Pub owner brings famous scones to new shop in East Village

Mary O’Halloran uses her mother’s recipe from County Mayo, Ireland to bake up Irish soda bread scones.

Baking has become second nature to O’Halloran, who was first featured on NY1 in January 2021, when she starting selling the scones online while her East Village pub Mary O’s was closed during the pandemic.

The scones were a huge hit, and even more so when an Instagram post by Brandon Stanton’s “Humans of New York” featured O’Halloran seven months later, sparking $1million in sales of her scones.

She made each scone herself, and it took one year and 10 months to compete all the orders.

“What was really important to me was that everybody that ordered those scones, that they got the actual scones, the same way that I sent them out during COVID, because that’s what they ordered,” O’Halloran said. 

Three years and hundreds of thousands of scones later, the mother of six has opened an Irish soda bread shop on East Seventh Street near First Avenue.

It’s a place for scones, a cup of coffee or an Irish tea, a stone’s throw — or scone’s throw — from her pub. 

“The idea is that people just come in, and I’m baking the scones as the people are in and out of the store, that they are not just pre-made or anything,” O’Halloran said. 

After dreaming of opening a shop for years, the space became available six months ago.

So with her six kids, her husband, who, as a longshoreman, can be gone months at a time, the pub and now the shop, O’Halloran says it keeps her busy, for sure.

She says it sounds hard, but things are easier when you love what you are doing.

“There’s some sort of magic in it and that’s it, that’s the bottom line, it’s there, and people who get it, they feel it too,” O’Halloran said. 

Mary O’s Irish Soda Bread Shop will be open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 7 a.m. until the scones sell out, and will be open for special holiday hours for pre-order pickup. 

For more information, head to the shop’s website.