Forty Years Serving teh Community: A Cork Family’s food Legacy

It’s been 40 years as Tom Harrington of Churchfield took over the Burger Hut in Hollyhill. Though, his passion for the fast food industry began in 1981, when he started working at his wife’s family business, the popular city eatery, the Pickin’ Chicken.

During the 1980s recession, Burger Hut served as a second job for the self-described “proud Norrie,” who was also employed with the ESB until 1996.

“We had one car when I started,” Tom recalls.”So my wife would come down to the ESB with the twins in the car, and we’d drive home, drop them off, and I’d go to work at the Burger Hut.”

Three decades later, those twins – Scott and Mark, now 41 – are poised to take over the family food business, rebranding it as an self-reliant pizzeria and chipper called TOMTOMS, a tribute to their father’s legacy.

Interestingly, it was Scott and Mark who initially inspired Tom to diversify into pizza in the 1990s, demonstrating entrepreneurial spirit from a young age.

“We had four kids,” says Tom, “and when you’d ask them what food they wanted, they’d always say pizza.”

“So I realized,with my wisdom,that this is where younger people were heading,and where traditional chippers needed to go.”

This insight led Tom to purchase an Apache Pizza franchise in 2001,bringing it to Cork’s northside.

Under the franchise agreement, they could offer both pizza and their original chipper menu, appealing to the entire family. The concept proved highly prosperous, as Tom explains:

“The way I saw it was that basically, the father was the one paying for the food. So if he didn’t like pizza, what could he get?

“So at our place, you could get a pizza for the kids and a fish supper for the dad… It covered all ages.”

The family expanded the Apache Pizza franchise south of the river to Douglas and Bishopstown.

Scott and Mark, who had both worked in the business part-time for most of their lives, joined the Douglas branch full-time in 2012.

Tom had always envisioned a family business, but he wanted the twins to pursue their own paths first.

“We went away and did our own thing,” explains Scott. “Then the recession happened in Ireland in 2007, 2008, when I was an electrician. So it was just kind of organic – the prospect arose in Douglas, and we said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.'”

Mark had held various jobs before joining the family business full-time, including repairing catering equipment – a skill that proved invaluable when he joined his dad and brother at the restaurants. As Mark describes it: