It’s rather cool for an early summer Tuesday evening, but Tommy McCarthy is feeling the warmth.

After all, this is the night of the week when he and his wife, Louise Costello, along with their daughter Rose, host the Irish music session at their recently opened Porter Square bar, McCarthy’s & Toad. 

Just inside the front entrance, McCarthy stows his fiddle on a window shelf by the table where Costello and Rose are sitting, along with guitarist Simon Lace. There’s still a bit of time before the session is slated to begin (7 p.m.), and he leads a visitor on a brief tour of the place, greeting employees and patrons alike – including two members of a knitting club that meets there – along the way. 

“Myself and Louise, we’ve been in the pub business for 30 years now,” he says. “At this stage of my life, it’s nice to have a place that’s known for traditional Irish music at 7 p.m. seven days a week.

“And people seem to be enjoying it,” he adds laconically, eyeing the slow but steady influx of customers.

McCarthy and Costello, as most everyone in (and beyond) the Boston area Irish music community well knows, are no neophytes when it comes to running a tavern: This is the fourth establishment they’ve opened in the past 30 years, The Burren in Davis Square (which debuted in 1996) being the oldest.

So when news surfaced last year that the couple had bought the former site of Christopher’s Restaurant and Bar, and the diminutive adjacent bar known as Toad – long a dearly loved showcase for local indie music acts – a groundswell of anticipation rippled among musicians and music-lovers alike. What did Tommy and Louise have planned? How would the new place compare with The Burren, or The Bebop, their pub/restaurant near the Berklee College of Music (they also ran The Skellig in Waltham from 2002-18)? And how soon was it going to open?

The answer to the last question came in early April. While the answers to the other questions are continuing to take shape, early indications are that McCarthy’s & Toad carry on what can arguably be regarded as the McCarthy-Costello brand: bright, vibrant and well-populated venues that are havens for live Irish/Celtic music, both performances and jam sessions, but also feature other genres ranging from old-time to singer-songwriter to pub rock to jazz.

That legacy is a result of focus and hard work, to be sure, but friends say there’s more.

“It’s a wonderful case of generosity plus a love of music equaling success,” says Tom Bianchi, who has worked with the couple for years managing music events at The Burren and is also doing so at McCarthy’s & Toad. “Tommy and Louise have good instincts, and a willingness to be human and let people do their jobs the best they can.”

Tommy McCarthy

“The kettle is on, but not fully boiled.”

The prelude to this new chapter in McCarthy and Costello’s life came in early 2023, when the owners of Christopher’s, which had closed during the pandemic, confirmed it would not reopen; they also declared their intention to sell Toad, which had been back in business on a limited basis for several months, as well as the restaurant.

McCarthy and Costello hadn’t been particularly interested in starting a new pub. But when negotiations for the sale of Christopher’s fell through in the fall of 2023, and the fate of Toad looked equally unclear, the couple were urged – by Bianchi, among others – to step in. Their purchase of the property encompassing both establishments was completed in June of last year.

There was undoubtedly a good-news aspect to the sale – locals keep a beloved local business local – but McCarthy and Costello also saw the possibilities in adding Christopher’s and Toad to their enterprise. During the past year, according to McCarthy, more millennials (roughly 29 to 44-year-olds) moved to Cambridge than anywhere else in the US. It’s a segment of the population he believes can appreciate the offerings of “Upstairs McCarthy” (the second floor dining room), like its weekly comedy show and open mic, and also those of Toad – including not only rock shows but “Irish Reggae” night, in which Irish songs are given a Jamaican makeover, and “Sunday Spins,” where customers bring their favorite LPs to play on the house turntable.

Oh yes, and of course, there are the nightly Irish sessions – plus a Scottish session Sundays at noon – which can appeal to any generation.  

“We have some incredible musicians in this area,” says McCarthy, “and when they get together and play like they do – well, even if you’re not that familiar with Irish or Scottish traditional music, you can appreciate the talent and the energy.”

Given that McCarthy’s and The Burren are less than a mile apart – you can walk from one to the other in 15 minutes or less – the question arises as to whether they are essentially their own stiffest competitor. But McCarthy sees them as complementary: The Burren’s Backroom provides a performance space that McCarthy’s doesn’t have, for example, while the McCarthy’s nightly Irish session has an earlier starting time than that of The Burren (9:30).

“The McCarthy’s session is like a concert in the Burren Backroom with the atmosphere of the Burren Front Room,” says McCarthy.

Given the build-up of anticipation over the McCarthy & Toad opening, and the widespread acclamation since then, it might be easy for McCarthy and Costello to take a victory lap, or two. But they’ve been in the business for too long to read too much into a small sample size. 

“It’s all still very new: We’re not even to the halfway point of the first year yet,” he says. “We’re also coming into summer, and things tend to slow down. The weather gets hot, and people don’t want to come out, or else they’re going away on vacation. So we’ll see.”

McCarthy points to The Bebop as an example of why it pays to play the long game: “The original idea for The Bebop came from a Berklee professor who’d performed in the Backroom and said we should open a pub near the school. But when we did get going, at first we couldn’t get the Berklee kids to come in and play. We used to joke that ‘Berklee doesn’t teach you to play in pubs.’ 

“When we talked to the students, though, a lot of them said, ‘We don’t really have bars back home, we were never brought to them as kids – we had Applebees.’ So the idea of playing in a bar was something they never considered. But eventually, they did start coming in. These things just take time.”

That patience on the part of McCarthy and Costello, Bianci says, is also what makes them successful – and something of a rarity among pub owners.

“I’ve done millions of gigs for a million years, as a performer or an organizer or both, and if something doesn’t click right away, the owner often just says: ‘This isn’t working, forget it.’ Tommy and Louise have always said that it takes time – as much as five years – to build a business and make it what you want it to be. That sort of big-picture wisdom is very unusual, and very welcome in this line of work.”

(Another tenet of the McCarthy/Costello philosophy is never to have TV sets in a bar where you have live music: “The musicians won’t know if people are clapping for the music or because someone scored a goal,” quips McCarthy.)

Neither McCarthy nor Costello had any business background, experience, or education when they first got the idea to buy that vacant storefront near Davis Square that would become The Burren. There was no plan, nor a particular desire, to forge a mini-empire in the hospitality industry. They had both been raised in families steeped in the Irish tradition, and that was their guiding light.

“We just thought it would be great to have a pub where we could play music,” says McCarthy, who adds that he and Costello “look forward to celebrating 30 years next January.”

Not everything the couple touched has turned to gold, and they’re the first to acknowledge it. The Skellig did well for a while, but the initial success turned out not to be sustainable. It might have been the location, says McCarthy, or other factors: He thinks that perhaps they should’ve had a regular slate of performances and other events in The Skellig’s back room, like those of The Burren, to build an audience.

“It’s too bad it didn’t work out, but I’m not sorry we tried,” he says.

So now, they’re putting to use all the lessons learned, trying to figure out what will bring people out to McCarthy’s and Toad, and what will keep them coming back. McCarthy offers some observations about, for example, the interplay between the upstairs and downstairs dining areas, and notes a few potential ideas under consideration. 

“The kettle is on,” he says, “but not fully boiled.”

Finally, it’s 7 p.m., and McCarthy gets out his fiddle and settles in on the left of Costello and her banjo, and across from Rose, who also plays fiddle (joining them later is fiddler Hannah O’Brien, another offspring of a traditional Irish music family). They and Lace exchange some pleasantries, then launch into a crisp set of jigs. Some of the diners turn their heads to watch for a few minutes. The buzz of conversation in the room continues, but the music rides along the top of it – as will be the case for most of the next three hours. A very agreeable mutual co-existence.