Corrigan’s Deerpark Inn ready for opening

Virginia pub to open this coming weekend- Saturday, Sunday.

Chef Richard Corrigan's latest culinary venture, the Deerpark Inn in Virginia, is set to open this coming weekend.

The Irish restaurantrepreneur’s transformation of the former Chestnut Tree pub will come full circle when it opens to the public for the first time this coming Saturday, July 1.

Describing it as his “love affair”, Corrigan says excitement is building ahead of the launch- Saturday 3pm til late, and Sunday from 12:30pm- with sports aired on a big screen, live music and more.

Sister to the Virginia Park Lodge and its sprawling 100 acres which Corrigan bought in 2013 for a reported €1.1 million, the Deerpark Inn will standalone in the sense that the Ballivor-born chef sees it as “being a pub in that very Irish sense”.

“With the [Park] Lodge, and with this now I think we’ve tuned into something really good. It’s comfy loungy. I personally think it looks great. There’s a lovely sense to the place. We’ve Luke [Dodd] who did work for us at Daffodil Mulligan, he curated the art for us [at the Deepark Inn]. He has a wicked sense of humour and you should see what he done with some of the stuff.”

With six wonderful en-suite rooms upstairs, and a large outside area to the back, Corrigan plans to utilise the place for Sunday morning farmer’s markets and much more into the future.

It’s all part of Corrigan’s grand vision which began when he first bought the pub premises in 2019.

The plan now is to extend the opening hours at the Deerpark Inn as business picks up, but for now Corrigan says it’s important to “get the small stuff right”.

“We’ll go three days a week maybe, then extend that further maybe from September, Wednesday to Sunday. It about making sure we do it right. This is business at the end of the day. We’ve invested a lot into it, I don’t need to tell you that. It’s a lovely bar for growing up, and the people of Virginia will tell me soon enough what they think of it.”