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Drew Kalagher says he knows he’s gotten it right when the texture is like “meat butter.”

The owner and chef at Publick House, the 30-year-old Columbia bar best known for its ballyhooed chicken wings, makes this observation as he carves a batch of his homemade corned beef, served daily on the bar’s gloriously sloppy Reuben.

Kalagher said he’s the only chef he knows of in South Carolina that regularly makes corned beef in house, noting he’s been told by a distributor that there’s one other chef that does it twice a year. He wants to find out where that restaurant is and go see how it compares to his.

Watching Kalagher go through the laborious process, it becomes clear why more restaurants don’t go through the undertaking. The brisket has to be boiled low and slow and then sit and preserve for three weeks in a homemade brine seasoned with regular salt, pink curing salt, brown sugar, cinnamon, black pepper, mustard seed, cloves, allspice berries, ground ginger, juniper berries and crushed bay leaves.

Kalagher dialed in his spice blend himself, inspired by his family.

“I’ve always liked corned beef. [I] come from an Irish family,” he said. “My grandmothers, great-grandmothers would actually make theirs. Unfortunately, I never inherited any of their recipes, but I think I’ve come pretty close. My great-grandmother was a fantastic cook, and I grew up next door to her for a few years. I spent a lot of time in her kitchen.”

Once each of the 2-3 briskets Kalagher goes through each week is properly brined, he takes them out cold and scrapes off the fat by hand. Getting them to this point, where enough fat has rendered into the meat to make it tender and buttery, requires painstaking precision during the boil.

“The boiling process takes about three and a half hours,” Kalagher said. “I’ve checked them before at three and a half hours and they’re not ready. 10 minutes later, a whole piece of meat, it all [falls apart] at once. If you push it in the pot while it’s boiling, it should move like the water, it’ll ripple. If it’s not doing that, leave it in the pot.”

The corned beef, which Kalagher previously whipped up just once a year for St. Patrick’s Day, is now a permanent fixture on the menu. It’s one of many changes rolled out since January 2023, when Publick House reopened following an extensive renovation. Rebooting the bar has been an ongoing project since, including a rolling overhaul of the menu that is now largely complete.

Rebooting Publick House

The business has been deliberately slow-rolling its changes, waiting until its new ideas are fully formed to market them in earnest to the community.

The Reuben and its deliberately crafted protein are indicative of the approach the business is taking to sprucing up its menu and its environment, honing and emphasizing things the neighborhood bar has done well through the years.

Seating was updated, and the previously dark barroom walls were lightened with gray paint and a jovial whale-and-diver mural trumpeting that the pub is still a place to turn when you need a Guinness.

But there’s much more on offer for those looking for a beer, as a top-of-the-line beer cooler with 18 taps was added, designed to keep each of those brews pouring at the specific temperature that suits it best.

The menu was paired down to emphasize quality, with a selection of weekly specials to keep things interesting — including the juicy and peppery Wednesday prime rib, another item that Kalagher proudly preps, and a Monday burger night paired with a pint special to motivate customers to explore those draft beers.

Publick House is open for lunch again, part of an effort to get people to see them as much as a restaurant as a bar.

Turning 30 this year, the Columbia staple on Devine Street, sandwiched between the bougie-leaning Shandon neighborhood and the far-less-buttoned-up Five Points, the doorstep to the University of South Carolina, has reshaped itself to survive another three decades in the location, offering a compromise likely to satisfy both of the key crowds that surround it.

‘Get women and families back’

Matt Catchpole, who worked previously as the general manager at West Columbia fine-dining spot Terra, was brought in as a consultant to help with the overhaul.

He said Publick House had become a spot where husbands would come when their wives were busy or out of town.

“Get women and families back was the big thing,” Catchpole said. “A big part of it was that we had retained a crowd of people that were pretty loyal regulars, but we had inadvertently sort of eroded the breadth of our base.”

Catchpole and Kalagher said this is why they honed and enhanced the food selection, trying to make Publick House a restaurant people will come to even when they don’t want to drink. It’s also why they added the new beer cooler along with a selection of craft cocktails, looking to add options to bring in beer patrons looking for more elevated libations.

The need to open up Publick House to people beyond its regulars is also why they put a big emphasis on updating the space, which had simply gotten old.

“The back bar was still designed for mini bottles,” Kalagher noted, referring to the time before state law changed in 2006 that bars were required to serve liquor from those tiny receptacles.

The last part of the Public House overhaul is yet to come, as the business has held the lease on an adjacent bar space, previously home to Black Market Tavern, for a few years now.

“We had initially conceived that that would be more Publick House and maybe used as private events,” Catchpole said of how plans have developed, noting that they hope to bring the two spaces together by knocking down the wall separating them. “We now conceive that we may open it just Friday and Saturday nights as a sort of adjacent, but not branded the same, cocktail bar.”

The wings aren’t changing

One thing that won’t be changing are the beloved wings and raw fries, often cited as among the best in Columbia. Kalagher, who started working at Publick House in 2007 before purchasing the bar in 2012, said the only changes he ever made there were to one or two of the wing sauces, including the hottest sauce, now known as “Caro-Lava!”

He’s the only one who’s ever made that sauce. Unlike the other homemade sauces, nobody else knows that recipe. He was inspired to concoct it when he first arrived in the Publick House kitchen.

“I was kind of wondering the first week why nobody ever ordered it. Somebody finally did,” Kalagher recalled. “The other two cooks looked around and just started grabbing the hottest things they could find and dumping it in a pan — ‘So is there a recipe?’ ‘Oh, no, just grab whatever’s hot and throw it in there.’

“I immediately started working on a recipe,” the chef added.

The hope in Publick House’s new era is for it to continue to exist as a comforting neighborhood bar, putting fresh emphasis on classic dishes and others that Kalagher enjoys making.

Another expression of this is coming back soon. For a second year, he will roll out a selection of German specialties for Oktoberfest.

“Drew wanted to keep some of these classics that were the old Publick House from 30 years ago,” Catchpole said. “But we also wanted to have the ability to have something that’s a little bit fresher.”

Publick House on Devine Street Map