Murphy’s Chef Continues His Legacy at Atlanta Restaurant

“It was the first time, after all the meals I ate here in high school while he worked here, that I had to cook for him,” Matt said. “I was able to turn it around and it was really fun.”

“He’s a much better cook than I ever was,” said Gregg, 66, who moved to Florida in 2010 to open Grand Marlin in Pensacola Beach, where he is business manager and partner . “I know how to run a kitchen and how to run a restaurant, but he’s now teaching me cooking techniques that I never thought possible.”

What more can a father ask for than to see his offspring follow in his footsteps and succeed so spectacularly? Even though they won’t be together this Father’s Day — Matt will be working at Murphy’s and Gregg will be enjoying a day off in Florida — their mutual admiration goes without saying.

Credit: Courtesy of Matt McCarthy

Credit: Courtesy of Matt McCarthy

“We could say he had it”

Some children know very well young age that they want to follow in their parents’ professional footsteps. Matt McCarthy was not one of them. He always loved hearing stories about Gregg’s time at the Buckhead Diner, Ray’s on the River and later Murphy’s, and he would occasionally spend time in the kitchens while his father finished his shift. But it wasn’t until high school that the cooking bug.

Some of her earliest memories of her father’s cooking date back to when the family, including his older brother Chris and his mother Audrey were vacationing in Lake George in in upstate New York and enjoy big Italian pasta on Sundays with rigatoni, sausage and meatballs.

Matt was 13 when he began considering cooking as a career, despite the efforts of Gregg and Audrey, who also worked in the hospitality industry. The couple tried to steer their son toward other activities, but soon realized he had a passion for food.

“It’s a tough job,” Gregg said. “While everyone else is having fun, you work holidays, weekends and nights. You sacrifice a lot of family time for the industry, but it’s your love and passion. And if you don’t have that, life is difficult. But we could tell he had it.

“It was never, ‘Don’t do it,’ it was more like, ‘Maybe do something else,’” said Matt, who grew up in Marietta and went to Sprayberry High School. “But my friends would come home after school to watch Cartoon Network, and I would either watch ‘Barefoot Contessa’ on Food Network” or Animal Planet.

He originally planned to become a marine biologist, but after taking a biology course, he realized he wanted something less academic and more practical. “Once I got to high school and was able to choose my classes and examine my interests in more detail, I discovered it wasn’t for me. So when I filtered out all the other things I thought I wanted to do, cooking was the only thing that wasn’t filtered.

Matt got a job at 16 making pies at Galla’s Pizza in Marietta and began cooking for his friends. They still joke about the time he whipped up a giant pan of fried rice and added slices of kielbasa, the only protein he had on hand. (“Actually, I remember it being pretty good,” Matt said).

Credit: Courtesy of Matt McCarthy

Credit: Courtesy of Matt McCarthy

Gregg encouraged Matt to apply to his alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. Gregg agreed to buy a pallet of sweet potatoes so Matt could make sweet potato gnocchi for a scholarship competition that asked contestants to come up with a dish from Thanksgiving leftovers, but he restrained himself from too much s ‘involved in Matt’s process.

“He didn’t help me intentionally,” said Matt, who took second place in the competition. “He helped me figure it out for myself.” It was the first real culinary challenge I had to take on.

“Knowing that this was going to be the rest of his life, I knew this would be the smallest challenge he would have to face,” Gregg said. “It would have been easy for me to jump in, but it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.”

While Matt attended the CIA, father and son bonded over phone catch-up sessions about everything from the professors they shared to their favorite method for breaking down a chicken.

“My dad, who has done everything and has the same degree as me, had been through this,” Matt said. “So I kind of had a lifeline.”

The gentle guidance continued after Matt graduated and worked under restaurateur Danny Meyer in New York, as a sous chef at Union Square Café and North End Grill.

When Matt got to work on some of his first shifts, he used what he remembered Gregg calling over the years “fifth gear.”

“You have four gears on a car, and there’s a fifth gear that you rarely use,” Gregg said. “And sometimes when I was in the kitchen and I said, ‘OK guys, fifth gear now, fifth gear.’ And all of a sudden, you click. You didn’t know you had it in you, but once you hit fifth gear, it was there.

Matt spent nearly a decade in New York, then in 2020, like so many others, everything changed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Gregg encouraged his son to come to Pensacola for what both thought would be a two-week quarantine. But when two weeks turned into a month with no end in sight, Matt realized he had to make some decisions. He bristled at his mother’s suggestion that he work for Gregg, something he always intentionally avoided. (“I never wanted to be known as ‘the chief’s son,'” he said.)

Instead, he helped open a barbecue restaurant before moving to Washington, D.C., where he worked as executive chef for the Michelin-starred restaurant Tail Up Goat. But after almost three years, he realized that he missed his hometown and was ready to welcome him back.

A family heirloom

In 2022, Tom Murphy, owner of Murphy’s Restaurant, was looking for a new executive chef and learned from Gregg that Matt was looking to return to Atlanta.

Open since 1992, Murphy’s has become an Atlanta classic known for comfort foods like its two-fisted burger and the famous Bonzo Cake. A favorite place to celebrate graduations and birthdays, it also serves as a launching pad for chefs who have opened their own successful restaurants, including Ian Winslade and, of course, Gregg McCarthy.

“In my head I was like, ‘All this time I didn’t want to work for you, does this change any of that?'” Matt said of the job his father once held. “But it was always me writing my own path, just with a really fun story behind it.”

Gregg’s legacy lives on at the restaurant. Guinness–the braised brisket he put on the menu years ago is still a guest favorite, and the three-star review of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution restaurant when he was chef still hangs on the wall.

Credit: Courtesy of Matt McCarthy

Credit: Courtesy of Matt McCarthy

“Murphy’s always strikes the right note between past and nostalgic,” wrote Meridith Ford, then AJC Food editor. “Part of the credit goes to executive chef Gregg McCarthy’s menu – a well-calculated blend of old and new, literally.”

Murphy believes Matt is the perfect steward of his father’s legacy and the restaurant, while leaving his own mark on the menu with dishes like almond trout with cauliflower puree and roasted grapes, and a Georgia shrimp roll.

“It was almost a godsend when he showed up,” Murphy said. “Like his father, he is a strong and passionate hospitalist and a talented cook who, I know, will be a talented restaurateur. He recognizes the dishes that are his signature but also adds his own touch. Having a younger Gregg McCarthy got me excited about the restaurant business again.

For his inspiration, Gregg draws on seasonal produce, cooking shows, Instagram as well as “memories of dishes I’ve eaten and flavor combinations I’ve loved,” he said. declared. “It’s not like, ‘Hey, I’m going to cook this exact dish,’ but I’m taking components or the thoughts behind them and putting my own filter on them.”

Although Gregg never imagined Matt would find himself back on his old stomping grounds, he said he’s proud of how far his son has come in such a short time. And even though they both have their own businesses, he hopes that one day they can own a restaurant together.

“Watching him cook here is like seeing the fruits of your labor.” Who knows what the future holds? Gregg said. “I learned the hard way, never to impose limits on things. »