FOOD
Owner Sami Taweel at the bar of Doherty's Irish Pub and Restaurant in Cary
PUBLIC HOUSE Doherty’s provides a gathering place, brews and Irish-American food in Cary and Apex by ADDIE LADNER photography by EAMON QUEENEY
“I’ve been a wild rover for many’s the year And I’ve spent all me money on whiskey and beer But now I’m returning with gold in great store And I never will play the wild rover no more”
S
ami Taweel may never have set foot in Ireland, but he knows this Irish tune all too well—he’s worked in or managed Irish pubs in the Triangle since he was
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eighteen. Taweel and his business partner, Donavan Favre, along with a dedicated staff, run Doherty’s, two friendly pubs known as the Cheers of Cary and Apex. Taweel says a true Irish pub is as much about hospitality as it is the pours and plates; a public house as a gathering place. “Before mass communication, the farmers would go to the village pub to get their news,” says David McCutchen of Apex, originally from Limerick Ireland. “It’s often misconstrued that the Irish are drinkers. Sure, there are drinkers, but the
pub is more of a place for social gathering.” And that’s what Taweel tells his staff: “We don’t have customers—we have guests. How do you want them to feel?” Taweel learned this ethos from two men: his father, who owned several delis in Virginia, and Michael Doherty, the longtime Irish pub owner known for opening the former Tir na Nog and Connolly’s in the late 1990s. Taweel worked under him at Connolly’s, first as a server and part-time bartender while he was in college (he graduated from N.C. State
