> assiduous: showing great care, attention, and effort
Just thought I would define the word since I think the OP went out of his way to use a 10-dollar word buried deep in the text that wasn't in the original title.
On the subject of the article, though: next you're going to tell me the Mexican cantina I visited in Milwaukee isn't actually as authentic as the name implies! At least I know Little Bangkok in Philadelphia is the genuine thing. Right?
The notable thing about "Irish" bars, I think, is that there are so many of them in non-Irish places, compared to other types of "nation-branded drinking establishment."
Now you got me wondering if there is place in the world for "Wisconsin-style Taverns", complete with shorty-beer chasers for Bloody Marys, beer brewer branding signage styled from the 50s, and dollar bills stuck to the ceiling by darts...
Most dives I've been to have two of the three, and in lieu of the bloody mary beer chaser they've got a 2 for one special on a shot of cheap whisky and a PBR.
Living in Dublin, I would be thrilled to find a southern California dive bar with hoppy IPA's, shuffleboard, and an outdoor seating area. For those who've been, something like Hamilton's in San Diego.
Some of them have the first and last (Beer Market near Christchurch comes to mind), but none have quite managed the shuffleboard.
After reading your first sentence I was going to mention Beer Market.
I was in Ireland for the college football game at Avia last September and my hoppy beer loving friends took up residence there for the couple of days that we were in Dublin. Great place.
Problem is that New Glarus is only available in Wisconsin. So the best Wisconsin beer option wouldn't be available elsewhere.
Another thing I've seen in a number of Wisconsin taverns and dive bars: small beer glasses that hold ~10oz (300ml) max that they give you with your bottle of beer.
I have definitely seen American-style bars in Europe and Japan. You get New York-themed, Californian, Hawaiian and generic American. Often with '50s decorations.
Thanks for that definition. I didn't know the word, but it for some reason carried a negative connotation for me. Perhaps because I linked it with "insidious"?
I think it's the way it's used - the headline seems to suggest that these prefab bars are cheap imitations of real culture, but assiduous doesn't actually participate in that connotation.
I also thought negatively of the word before I looked it up. I honestly do feel the HN headline was chosen specifically to drive emotions like that, there's no other reason for it to differ so wildly from the article headline.
Every 'Mexican' restaurant around here has the same furniture, menus, plates. It all has the exact same hand-painted looking Mexican caricatures and scenes on it it. So tacky.
I've got to say, compared to a lot of other prefabricated faux-cultural establishments these pubs seem pretty nice. Handmade wooden stuff, things made in Ireland, made by Irish people... doesn't seem half bad.
Sure, in an ideal world the bar would have its own completely genuine charm, and would be handmade, and the carvings would be whittled by the owner's son... but this strikes me as a pretty good compromise given the harsh realities of starting a new pub/restaurant.
Pretty sad though, the loss of authenticity. And the resignation of a comment like this. Also the part about how customers should accept it because of the considerations capital has in starting it up.
I don't think 'authenticity' is that simple. I'm a Canadian, I love hockey and have a pretty good understanding of it. I could make a 'hockey stick' shape out of plywood and paint it up to look good, and you could even in theory use it to smack a puck around, but its still not an authentic hockey stick.
When I was in Dublin the thing that really surprised me was how every bar.. er... pub had these amazing Irish musicians who sort of picked up various instruments and just went at it. I would identify it as "irish folk music" though if they were belting out lesser known Richard Thompson tunes, I would not know.
Were they paid? Did they carry their instruments with themselves? Who knows.
Now, I consider that authentic. Was it authentic? Do Irish people read this and think "he was stuck in that tourist trap area" or do they think "yup, that's good 'ol homestyle music"?
Good question. Probably an accumulation of our experience of a 'third place'. I like family run Italian cafes and restaurants. There are a few in Birmingham, I was in a very nice one in Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, and there are lots (still, just about) in London.
You could probably define a script that would reproduce a typical interior, and you could probably build a reasonable facsimile of a family run Italian cafe in a shopping centre easily enough. But I would not have been eating there for 30 years...
There's a bar in Queens that has a killer session Sunday nights (there are dozens at other bars in NYC throughout the week). It drives me insane but during football season, they cancel the session if the Giants or Jets are on TV. Alas, at least 2x as many people show up for football as for music.
That's a "session" and it's pretty authentic. Musicians are generally unpaid (although a bar might hire some to get started) and bring their own instruments. It does have a complex non-obvious etiquette about who participates. It's effectively "peer production" of entertainment.
It's not just Irish pubs. Here in Minneapolis, we have a lot of bars that cater to local bands. You can drop in most evenings and hear live local music - some good, some not so good - and have a drink. Bands might divvy up a small cover charge, or might just get a couple of free beers (and not the good beers). It's a place to play.
Go elsewhere, you'll hear pick-up country jams, playing the classics. Or hip-hop, or slam poetry, or Irish music, or bebop.
A big part of what makes something like Irish session music, bluegrass, protest folk, bop, blues, etc work is a powerful shared vocabulary. There are songs everyone knows, and musical clichés that experienced performers can follow even if they don't know the specific tune. You like to play, you join the community, you get good, you get respected, and darn it, there's a bunch of people willing to actually listen to you while they drink a beer. For a lot of us, that's the reward.
"I used to think I was an artist. Turns out I'm a beer salesman." -James McMurtry
In most of the world, the foreign community there isn't large enough to create a genuine foreign pub, so if you want a genuine pub it's going to be "native", and that's not as interesting to the natives.
There are exceptions: New York City has a very high density of people from different countries. It's possible to walk around Flushing NY (part of Queens) and sit down at a completely genuine Chinese restaurant, where you will be given a menu with either a highly questionable English translation or none at all. Everything you will be surrounded with, from the language to the people to the decor, will be Chinese, and it will be a very authentic experience, and I personally love it.
But that can only happen where there's a dense population of Chinese people. It can happen in Flushing, where the population is 71% Asian. But it cannot happen in most of the US, where the local population is mostly homogeneous.
But that's the problem. There's demand for places like this because people want to know and experience more of other cultures, but at the same time we have politicians stoking hostility to actual people from other countries that could establish those communities and bring that cultural diversity, like that Steve King jackass from Iowa saying 'we can't rebuild our civilization with other people's babies.'
No, it's all horribly fake. The last time I was in an Irish bar like this I got closer to peer at an interesting photograph and realized that what I had thought was damage to the picture was actually a JPEG compression pattern.
IT's like visiting a Panda Express and feeling like you've been to China. As an actual Irish person it's nauseating and I'm ashamed of whatever one of my countrymen decided to make money out of this tacky fakery.
We do have a hospitable tradition in Ireland I'm proud of that, and I don't see anything wrong with starting a business on the back of that. It's the fakery that upsets me; it presents culture as something to be consumed rather than experienced, which is especially irritating given Ireland's former colonial status..
Hahahaha that's actually pretty damn funny. But there are some that are more authentic - I know fiddle music fairly well, and one I visited actually cared enough to have real Irish fiddle music, as well as pretty decent authentic woodcarvings, and no tacky fake-1800s fonts or faux-aged photographs.
The ones they talk about in this article seem to at least be slightly decent: they at least have stuff handmade in Ireland by Irish people. That takes a certain degree of commitment that's at the very least more authentic than a Panda Express.
I think what it boils down to is that people want to go to a "foreign" bar, and Ireland is a nice target. So at the end of the day -somebody- will open one, and you have a choice between this (which is at the least handmade in Ireland) vs some monstrosity decorated with dollar store shamrocks and green accent lighting.
you have a choice between this (which is at the least handmade in Ireland) vs some monstrosity decorated with dollar store shamrocks and green accent lighting.
In Cincinnati in the 90's, Hap's Old Irish Pub sometimes had such decorations, but stopped short of the green accent lighting. Ironically, it was arguably the most authentic pub, in that it came about organically to serve locals of Irish descent. As a result, most of the customers had little interest in Irish trad music and much more in the game on the TV.
I suspect there are a lot of bars of this pattern in the US. I know of one in SF.
this feckin' place has no bloody rug even, how ya gonna be standing after those stinking tiles get all slippery from beer, this is just not a way to build it, you know what I mean?
and where's the feckin' darts how are we gonna make friends without a glass game
(I've related some of this stuff to you before, but I also am writing this for 3rd party readers.)
Spotting and calling out "insta-pubs" was one of my hobbies in the US rust belt. It was one of the more profitable things to do with an old gas station in the late 90's/early 2000's, apparently. This led to some incongruous moments. I was in a musical group playing a regular thing at a very fancy insta-pub in Covington, KY. Our band leader was born in Ireland, but his college professor dad had moved to Atlanta, Georgia when he was just 13 or so, but he defiantly tried his best to keep his accent and not talk like he was from Georgia. Since the pub was new, it was staffed by a lot of native born Irish. So it came to pass that a young woman from the staff accused our Irish born band leader of faking his Irish accent.
(No one on the staff commented much on my being a Korean-American playing Irish traditional music, however.)
especially irritating given Ireland's former colonial status
Musician and professor Mick Moloney has often commented on the "reversed colonialism" of Irish traditional music and culture. It also applies to a lot of other traditional cultures. The past several hundred years of Irish culture can be characterized by various forms of destruction, warping, and rebirth/resurgence of cultural forms. (One could joke that the 78 record did a better job of destroying regional diversity than Cromwell, but not be too far from the truth.) That Irish traditional music should be in pubs at all could be taken as a bit of a cultural distortion, actually.
I'm really curious. What's the real difference between this (pub-in-a-box) and any pub in Ireland that was built in the last 50 years?
We do pretty much the same thing here. Most new-build pubs try to ape the traditional. The only thing this company is adding is a middle-man so you can import it all in one shot, rather than dealing with a myriad of vendors.
I realise it plays to the plastic-paddy stereotypes perfectly. But the nerd in me sees it as a simple solution to a logistical problem.
That pisess me off too XD I really don't like commodification; exploiting a combination of ignorance and nostalgia for commercial purposes is aesthetically horrible to me. I don't want to stop people doing it, but it makes me less and less inclined to participate in social life because so much of is mediated for corporate profit. This is psychologically unhealthy for the participants, in my view.
As a colonial myself I always get a laugh laugh when one of "us" cocks a snook at the English or the USA. So if I were Irish I might instead cheer them on for taking the piss out of the American heartland. In my case it's the "Outback Steakhouse" which isn't in any way an like an Aussie establishment I ever knew in AUS.
Of course in a more post modern vein: how do you know the customers aren't in on the joke?
And yet I never found an Irish pub in the US that understood music shouldn't be so loud it makes your ears bleed. Or that we have a number of great beers, not just Guinness (Galway Hooker, White Gypsy, and Porterhouse come to mind... though I think the last is available in NY)
I wish there was a better way to get craft beer/cider from other areas of the world. I suspect the biggest obstacle is regulation, but I wish it was at least possible to get from airports.
I'd guess the biggest obstacle is competition, actually. There's excellent local craft beer in even smallish midwestern cities, plus a substantial selection of top-notch beers from the region and the rest of the country.
It's different for, say, wine, because the economics are weird (the economics of grape growing and terroir in particular) and even with an ~2x markup from import and shipping you can grab a random $12 bottle of (say) Spanish wine and there's a very good chance it'll be a hell of a lot better than a random Californian at the same price point, plus, ignoring questions of quality, there's going to be significant demand for (especially) French wine for reputation and signaling reasons. European protection/assurance of production processes probably aids consumer confidence in European versus new-world wine, too, especially on the lower end.
Beer? I can get some damn good $10 US-made 4-packs. I've had some really wonderful $5 bombers. Good luck competing with that after the cost of importing, unless you've got something incredibly special.
In terms of taste testing and actual preference California has plenty of great wines. The real difference is why get's exported from Spain not what the average Spanish wine is like.
Eh, I'd guess the stuff in my usual $9-12 range is 3-5 euro at retail in Spain, judging from what I've seen on imported wines where I do know the price in their country of origin. So maybe not typical, but in the direction of ordinary table wine, not in the direction of being exceptional. As a wine cheapskate I've just found $9-12 on whatever's-from-Spain/Italy-and-seems-dryish gets me better results than the same lazy shopping style with domestic wine. I don't know much about higher-priced wines—when I (rarely) spend up I usually just shop by French AOC, again due to laziness. Also I live several states away from California—the local market there may be much more competitive with the cheaper end of the imported range.
Beer is also heavy. The simple math of $ per gram shipped might make it cost-prohibitive.
On the bright side, I got in to homebrewing because I really, really missed Arrogant Bastard. Now I can actually buy it here in Ireland (Stone started exporting it, and opened a brewery in Berlin), but at €6 for a 330ml bottle it's definitely something I only have as a treat.
Plenty of people get on airplanes with a bottle of water. Why not let them get on board with a bottle of local craft beer that they've bought after going through security? It would let them introduce their friends to beer/cider from another region.
I'm not talking about shipping cases of beer from San Francisco to Chicago and selling them at EWR. I'm talking about selling individual bottles at SFO and SJC.
That's what I noticed in two countries that I have lived in recent years. There is a big craft brewing scene both in Australia and in Poland. While it would be nice to get Polish craft beers in Australia, and also Australian craft beers in Poland, it's not economic unless it's very big name and sought after beer.
Right, but how does this impede selling Polish craft beer in Warsaw airport to a Pole who wants to introduce his London friends to some beers from his hometown?
Because airports charge a lot of money to the businesses that are there [0]. So the businesses have to appeal to the widest selection of travellers, so you get the most well known international brands and most general, safe, and average food. Craft beer is still mostly a speciality, and a lot of it is an acquired taste [1], so it cannot appeal to the majority of people.
[0] For example there was an article some time ago detailing plans RyanAir had for offering free flights. They (and the airports I presume) would make money from the things passengers buy at the airports.
[1] Bitter IPA, Sour beers, smoked beers, etc. Whenever we go out drinking craft beers, I always ask for a sample before I buy because there is always something that I don't like the taste of. I made the mistake before of ordering pints of beer and not being able to take more than a sip.
> There's excellent local craft beer in even smallish midwestern cities
Which is precisely why I want this to be a thing. I want a friend who is flying out of Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport to be able to get through security, pick up a bottle of something from a small brewery in Minnesota, get off in Boston, and bring me a beer I'd otherwise never be able to try.
Shipping liquids is very expensive which is why soda companies have bottling plants all over the country. You ship the dry ingredients and add water near your destination.
Beer is more difficult to produce so it's harder to create brewing/bottling all over the place. Larger brewers, like Heineken, can set up local bottling plants because they have the resources, but small craft brewers are not going to have the capability to do that. That means you've got to ship the brewed beer everywhere which, especially overseas or internationally, is going to be super expensive.
Interesting, I still haven't seen Irish pub with loud music. In the evening some of them transform into night bars, so I don't count those. I live in Dublin btw
I think that was CalRobert's point: pubs in Ireland don't have loud, blasting music but bars in the United States following the Irish pub theme do have loud music.
That is my number one favorite I've been drinking since the first time I had amazing fish and chips in howth at beeshoffs.
Second what reallllly irritates me is the food they serve in these "Irish" pubs. Mac and cheese with Guinness in the cheese sauce, or really dumb crimes like calling cottage pie, shepherds pie even though it's made with beef. And absolutely none of them knowing WHAT traditional Irish food is. No soda bread, no coddle, no Apple snow, just ignorance upon ignorance piled on to stealing "Irish culture" by people with money and NO respect for the country they are trying to imitate. I find it appalling and I ream these places in Yelp reviews.
There was a good (well, never been to Ireland so can't confirm closeness to its origins) Irish pub in Raleigh, NC. About 8 (9?) years back they changed chefs and went from serving the Irish food (again, maybe not totally authentic, but Irish) to "Irish" burgers and fries and, really, just generic American chain food. It was very sad, something unique to something totally generic, just like every bar/restaurant around it.
To be honest it's because I'm not crazy about Magner's, and because it's called Bulmer's in Ireland. It also seems to be pretty easy to come by abroad all things considered, though I'm partial to Woodchuck myself.
Regarding cuisine, on the bright side I also haven't seen soggy chips with a mountain of vaguely garlic scented mayo plopped on top exported to other countries as an example of Irish cuisine. The first time I had those I really missed Gordon Biersch :-).
There's some good food here (cheeses come to mind) but I think there's a reason the cuisine hasn't exactly been recognized by UNESCO, unlike Italy, France, or Mexico.
"There's a county map to go on the wall,
A hurling stick & a shinty ball,
The bric, the brac, the craic & all,
Lets call it an Irish pub,
Caffreys, Harp, Kilkenny on tap,
The Guinness pie & that cabbage crap,
The ideal wannabee Paddy trap,
We'll call it an Irish pub"
The corned beef and cabbage was a surprise the first time I visited an Irish-themed bar. The house gave me it complimentary ( for being Irish, I didn't emphasise the northern aspect ) and it was the first time I had ever eaten it...
Even more surprising was that many of them had a cocktail called a 'Carbomb' which they thought I'd find amusing. Pity I didn't have one called 'Wheelbarrow' in response.
Eventually we found a pub in Chicago called Celtic Crossing without adornments and with a Belfast barman who sold Club Orange fizzy-juice and Tayto crisps. Bliss.
Thanks for the cultural insight. I always wondered if the so-called "black and tan" beer cocktail was something that would be considered offensive to Irish people, although it's widely served in Irish-themed pubs here in the US.
In Kilkenny I had to teach the bartender how to make a Black and Tan (with a spoon). She had never heard of it, people gathered around to watch. They thought we were so strange.
"... In the summer of 1920, the Black and Tans burned and sacked many small towns and villages in Ireland, beginning with Tuam in County Galway in July 1920 and also including Trim, Balbriggan, Knockcroghery, Thurles and Templemore amongst many others. In November 1920, the Tans "besieged" Tralee in revenge for the IRA abduction and killing of two local RIC men. They closed all the businesses in the town, let no food in for a week and shot dead three local civilians. ..."
I had the same experience. I looked it up afterwards. Recent arrivals in NYC in the 1800s tried to celebrate Paddy's day with a traditional ham and cabbage meal. However, the local Jewish butchers didn't serve ham. Also, the Irish were super poor, and corned beef was the cheapest thing they could get.
So corned-beef and cabbage is an Irish-American tradition, but not an Irish one.
The "Irish Carbomb" drink (along with Black and Tan) amuses me. I hope to one day be able to do what I'm sure is an oft-repeated joke on it (apologies if I butcher)...
American Tourist in an Irish pub in Ireland: I'll have two Irish Carbombs please!
Bartender: No problem, coming right up!
Bartender: Sets down two tall shot glasses filled with vodka, then knocks them over.
Tourist: What the hell man!?
Bartender: Oh I'm sorry, I must have mixed up your order. Didn't you order a 9/11?
Since you mentioned it...here's the official music video of the Rumjacks' "An Irish Pub Song", for your entertainment pleasure (the lyrics are there too):
Just the other day I was talking with friends about how we all perceived the high quantity of cheap-to-medium-priced Irish bars in virtually every American city we know, especially compared to how much the average person could give a shit if his bar is Irish.
It's almost like those bars aren't even Irish themed, but rather that Irish culture is themed as cheap bars.
On a family trip to Disney World we wound up in an Irish themed restaurant that claimed to have been built in Ireland and shipped over. The idea seemed weird, I had no idea one could build a whole business around prefab Irish pubs.
I had suspected this existed, because it's pretty obvious from just being in the US that "generic Irish bar that could be anywhere in the US" is a thing.
Low-end American-Chinese restaurants are the same way.
In the US, there's a chain of Hibachi restaurants that are made of old traditional-style buildings that were shipped over from Japan. It's called Gasho [0].
A good irish bar is about the only place I can get people to go to where we can have a conversation in a booth with high wooden walls and not have our ears bleeding from loud music. The few irish bars that don't even do that are bound to fail. I don't really care if the bar is a premade transplant, as long as it fills that role well.
I have long wished the US would learn to have more pubs in that booth style, geared towards good alcohol and conversation, rather than music. English, Irish, Scottish, the structure is far too few between.
In the college town I am in I have thought a really cool bar would be a library/bar, designed for study groups, where you could bring a good non-fiction book and get a free drink or discount on one, and have an attached sleep-pod structure to encourage people to not drive drunk. Less sports bars, more intellectual bars...
I understand the frustration of the current state of things, but please don't write off 324 million people as all lacking intellectual traits. They are there, just far too hidden, with fewer places to congregate and not nearly as loud. Making fun of everyone for being ignorant is easy, putting effort into fostering the antithesis is much harder, but a more worthy cause.
First off - are you like sixteen years old? You're writing off hundreds of millions of people. Many of the best universities in the world are located in, funded by, and populated with Americans.
Americans in college towns probably tolerate or perhaps, yes, even like 'intellectualism'. A bar like that could very well become a community institution and reputable business. Have some perspective.
>Americans in college towns probably tolerate or perhaps, yes, even like 'intellectualism'. A bar like that could very well become a community institution and reputable business.
The problem with that idea is that 1) college students don't have a whole lot of money to spend on establishments like that, and 2) the profitability of such places is poor, compared to places that serve a LOT of alcohol and don't require as much floor space. The cost per square foot of commercial real estate these days is very high, so it just isn't profitable to have an establishment where there's plenty of space (so it isn't a crowded, noisy din), people can spend lots of time relaxing, quietly socializing, working on their laptop, etc., and they don't have to spend a lot of money. It's why Starbucks are all small and crowded, and coffee shops that attempt to buck this don't do so well. You can't pay the rent easily when people have nice lounge chairs and camp out with their laptops and only buy a coffee drink and a small snack. By contrast, look at how bars and restaurants operate: bars serve high-priced alcoholic drinks and customers don't usually stay long, and are crowded. Restaurants are fairly crowded, serve high-priced meals and push hard to get you to buy high-priced alcoholic drinks, and are very pushy to get you out the door so they can clear the table for the next customer.
>First off - are you like sixteen years old?
I'm not even going to honor that insult with an answer.
Oh yes, so much this. I can't drink but I like to go with friends and every bar seems to think that music cranked up to the level that would put a rock concert played by a jet engine to shame is the way to go. And I don't understand why.
We used to go to some offhand pub outside the big templebar tourist traps and brothel dressed as club around st'stevens and well that was awesome everyone just dropping by to talk, share their story, hear your's - the furniture is about the least defining thing for the irish pub experience.
Prefab faux interiors are common, but they're usually chains. Hungry Hunter (bankrupt 2008) had many identical looking restaurants, including an identical fake stuffed bear. Hollister, the poser surfer brand, built many identical-looking stores. Each with a fake surfboard with the fake signature of a famous surfboard maker, who sued them and won.
The last "Irish pub" I visited was essentially just a regular bar and grill with a vaguely Irish-ish menu.
After departing, the entire family said (paraphrasing), "WTF was that? That was about as Irish as a mariachi playing a didgeridoo."
They didn't even get a "you tried" sticker.
Mostly, we don't care about authenticity in restaurants. We just want thematic consistency. And the theme for an "Irish pub" is fish and chips, Guinness stew, and marginally classier decor than the rathole bar down the street. We know, deep down, that Outback Steakhouse is really only Australia-themed, rather than authentically Australian. But you'd better not break character when you're running one, buddy. You have to keep those stupid boomerangs nailed up on the walls.
And that's all the phenomenon is. It's a brand identity. It says "inexpensive, but not cheap", and it says "comfort food", and it says "automatic seasonal business every March".
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadJust thought I would define the word since I think the OP went out of his way to use a 10-dollar word buried deep in the text that wasn't in the original title.
On the subject of the article, though: next you're going to tell me the Mexican cantina I visited in Milwaukee isn't actually as authentic as the name implies! At least I know Little Bangkok in Philadelphia is the genuine thing. Right?
This sounds terrifying I don't want a dart to fall on my head!
Some of them have the first and last (Beer Market near Christchurch comes to mind), but none have quite managed the shuffleboard.
I was in Ireland for the college football game at Avia last September and my hoppy beer loving friends took up residence there for the couple of days that we were in Dublin. Great place.
Another thing I've seen in a number of Wisconsin taverns and dive bars: small beer glasses that hold ~10oz (300ml) max that they give you with your bottle of beer.
Every 'Mexican' restaurant around here has the same furniture, menus, plates. It all has the exact same hand-painted looking Mexican caricatures and scenes on it it. So tacky.
Sure, in an ideal world the bar would have its own completely genuine charm, and would be handmade, and the carvings would be whittled by the owner's son... but this strikes me as a pretty good compromise given the harsh realities of starting a new pub/restaurant.
That is a serious question. What is it?
When I was in Dublin the thing that really surprised me was how every bar.. er... pub had these amazing Irish musicians who sort of picked up various instruments and just went at it. I would identify it as "irish folk music" though if they were belting out lesser known Richard Thompson tunes, I would not know.
Were they paid? Did they carry their instruments with themselves? Who knows.
Now, I consider that authentic. Was it authentic? Do Irish people read this and think "he was stuck in that tourist trap area" or do they think "yup, that's good 'ol homestyle music"?
And can we reproduce that here?
Good question. Probably an accumulation of our experience of a 'third place'. I like family run Italian cafes and restaurants. There are a few in Birmingham, I was in a very nice one in Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, and there are lots (still, just about) in London.
You could probably define a script that would reproduce a typical interior, and you could probably build a reasonable facsimile of a family run Italian cafe in a shopping centre easily enough. But I would not have been eating there for 30 years...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVgUjj6RxU
There's a bar in Queens that has a killer session Sunday nights (there are dozens at other bars in NYC throughout the week). It drives me insane but during football season, they cancel the session if the Giants or Jets are on TV. Alas, at least 2x as many people show up for football as for music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_traditional_music_sessio...
Go elsewhere, you'll hear pick-up country jams, playing the classics. Or hip-hop, or slam poetry, or Irish music, or bebop.
A big part of what makes something like Irish session music, bluegrass, protest folk, bop, blues, etc work is a powerful shared vocabulary. There are songs everyone knows, and musical clichés that experienced performers can follow even if they don't know the specific tune. You like to play, you join the community, you get good, you get respected, and darn it, there's a bunch of people willing to actually listen to you while they drink a beer. For a lot of us, that's the reward.
"I used to think I was an artist. Turns out I'm a beer salesman." -James McMurtry
There are exceptions: New York City has a very high density of people from different countries. It's possible to walk around Flushing NY (part of Queens) and sit down at a completely genuine Chinese restaurant, where you will be given a menu with either a highly questionable English translation or none at all. Everything you will be surrounded with, from the language to the people to the decor, will be Chinese, and it will be a very authentic experience, and I personally love it.
But that can only happen where there's a dense population of Chinese people. It can happen in Flushing, where the population is 71% Asian. But it cannot happen in most of the US, where the local population is mostly homogeneous.
That's why bars like this are in demand.
IT's like visiting a Panda Express and feeling like you've been to China. As an actual Irish person it's nauseating and I'm ashamed of whatever one of my countrymen decided to make money out of this tacky fakery.
We do have a hospitable tradition in Ireland I'm proud of that, and I don't see anything wrong with starting a business on the back of that. It's the fakery that upsets me; it presents culture as something to be consumed rather than experienced, which is especially irritating given Ireland's former colonial status..
The ones they talk about in this article seem to at least be slightly decent: they at least have stuff handmade in Ireland by Irish people. That takes a certain degree of commitment that's at the very least more authentic than a Panda Express.
I think what it boils down to is that people want to go to a "foreign" bar, and Ireland is a nice target. So at the end of the day -somebody- will open one, and you have a choice between this (which is at the least handmade in Ireland) vs some monstrosity decorated with dollar store shamrocks and green accent lighting.
In Cincinnati in the 90's, Hap's Old Irish Pub sometimes had such decorations, but stopped short of the green accent lighting. Ironically, it was arguably the most authentic pub, in that it came about organically to serve locals of Irish descent. As a result, most of the customers had little interest in Irish trad music and much more in the game on the TV.
I suspect there are a lot of bars of this pattern in the US. I know of one in SF.
and where's the feckin' darts how are we gonna make friends without a glass game
Spotting and calling out "insta-pubs" was one of my hobbies in the US rust belt. It was one of the more profitable things to do with an old gas station in the late 90's/early 2000's, apparently. This led to some incongruous moments. I was in a musical group playing a regular thing at a very fancy insta-pub in Covington, KY. Our band leader was born in Ireland, but his college professor dad had moved to Atlanta, Georgia when he was just 13 or so, but he defiantly tried his best to keep his accent and not talk like he was from Georgia. Since the pub was new, it was staffed by a lot of native born Irish. So it came to pass that a young woman from the staff accused our Irish born band leader of faking his Irish accent.
(No one on the staff commented much on my being a Korean-American playing Irish traditional music, however.)
especially irritating given Ireland's former colonial status
Musician and professor Mick Moloney has often commented on the "reversed colonialism" of Irish traditional music and culture. It also applies to a lot of other traditional cultures. The past several hundred years of Irish culture can be characterized by various forms of destruction, warping, and rebirth/resurgence of cultural forms. (One could joke that the 78 record did a better job of destroying regional diversity than Cromwell, but not be too far from the truth.) That Irish traditional music should be in pubs at all could be taken as a bit of a cultural distortion, actually.
We do pretty much the same thing here. Most new-build pubs try to ape the traditional. The only thing this company is adding is a middle-man so you can import it all in one shot, rather than dealing with a myriad of vendors.
I realise it plays to the plastic-paddy stereotypes perfectly. But the nerd in me sees it as a simple solution to a logistical problem.
Of course in a more post modern vein: how do you know the customers aren't in on the joke?
It's different for, say, wine, because the economics are weird (the economics of grape growing and terroir in particular) and even with an ~2x markup from import and shipping you can grab a random $12 bottle of (say) Spanish wine and there's a very good chance it'll be a hell of a lot better than a random Californian at the same price point, plus, ignoring questions of quality, there's going to be significant demand for (especially) French wine for reputation and signaling reasons. European protection/assurance of production processes probably aids consumer confidence in European versus new-world wine, too, especially on the lower end.
Beer? I can get some damn good $10 US-made 4-packs. I've had some really wonderful $5 bombers. Good luck competing with that after the cost of importing, unless you've got something incredibly special.
On the bright side, I got in to homebrewing because I really, really missed Arrogant Bastard. Now I can actually buy it here in Ireland (Stone started exporting it, and opened a brewery in Berlin), but at €6 for a 330ml bottle it's definitely something I only have as a treat.
I'm not talking about shipping cases of beer from San Francisco to Chicago and selling them at EWR. I'm talking about selling individual bottles at SFO and SJC.
More airports could use something like this: http://www.stonebrewing.com/visit/outposts/airport
Also beer doesn't travel nearly as well as wine.
[0] For example there was an article some time ago detailing plans RyanAir had for offering free flights. They (and the airports I presume) would make money from the things passengers buy at the airports.
[1] Bitter IPA, Sour beers, smoked beers, etc. Whenever we go out drinking craft beers, I always ask for a sample before I buy because there is always something that I don't like the taste of. I made the mistake before of ordering pints of beer and not being able to take more than a sip.
Which is precisely why I want this to be a thing. I want a friend who is flying out of Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport to be able to get through security, pick up a bottle of something from a small brewery in Minnesota, get off in Boston, and bring me a beer I'd otherwise never be able to try.
Shipping liquids is very expensive which is why soda companies have bottling plants all over the country. You ship the dry ingredients and add water near your destination.
Beer is more difficult to produce so it's harder to create brewing/bottling all over the place. Larger brewers, like Heineken, can set up local bottling plants because they have the resources, but small craft brewers are not going to have the capability to do that. That means you've got to ship the brewed beer everywhere which, especially overseas or internationally, is going to be super expensive.
That is my number one favorite I've been drinking since the first time I had amazing fish and chips in howth at beeshoffs.
Second what reallllly irritates me is the food they serve in these "Irish" pubs. Mac and cheese with Guinness in the cheese sauce, or really dumb crimes like calling cottage pie, shepherds pie even though it's made with beef. And absolutely none of them knowing WHAT traditional Irish food is. No soda bread, no coddle, no Apple snow, just ignorance upon ignorance piled on to stealing "Irish culture" by people with money and NO respect for the country they are trying to imitate. I find it appalling and I ream these places in Yelp reviews.
Regarding cuisine, on the bright side I also haven't seen soggy chips with a mountain of vaguely garlic scented mayo plopped on top exported to other countries as an example of Irish cuisine. The first time I had those I really missed Gordon Biersch :-).
There's some good food here (cheeses come to mind) but I think there's a reason the cuisine hasn't exactly been recognized by UNESCO, unlike Italy, France, or Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...
"There's a county map to go on the wall, A hurling stick & a shinty ball, The bric, the brac, the craic & all, Lets call it an Irish pub, Caffreys, Harp, Kilkenny on tap, The Guinness pie & that cabbage crap, The ideal wannabee Paddy trap, We'll call it an Irish pub"
Even more surprising was that many of them had a cocktail called a 'Carbomb' which they thought I'd find amusing. Pity I didn't have one called 'Wheelbarrow' in response.
Eventually we found a pub in Chicago called Celtic Crossing without adornments and with a Belfast barman who sold Club Orange fizzy-juice and Tayto crisps. Bliss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_Tans
"... In the summer of 1920, the Black and Tans burned and sacked many small towns and villages in Ireland, beginning with Tuam in County Galway in July 1920 and also including Trim, Balbriggan, Knockcroghery, Thurles and Templemore amongst many others. In November 1920, the Tans "besieged" Tralee in revenge for the IRA abduction and killing of two local RIC men. They closed all the businesses in the town, let no food in for a week and shot dead three local civilians. ..."
...or Fanta? :)
So corned-beef and cabbage is an Irish-American tradition, but not an Irish one.
The carbomb drink always seemed like a WTF to me. I wondered how people from Ireland felt about it.
American Tourist in an Irish pub in Ireland: I'll have two Irish Carbombs please!
Bartender: No problem, coming right up!
Bartender: Sets down two tall shot glasses filled with vodka, then knocks them over.
Tourist: What the hell man!?
Bartender: Oh I'm sorry, I must have mixed up your order. Didn't you order a 9/11?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDTQQWSmo8s
(Over 26 million views -- impressive.)
It's almost like those bars aren't even Irish themed, but rather that Irish culture is themed as cheap bars.
Low-end American-Chinese restaurants are the same way.
[0]: http://www.gasho.com/about-us/
They don't literally drop them.
I have long wished the US would learn to have more pubs in that booth style, geared towards good alcohol and conversation, rather than music. English, Irish, Scottish, the structure is far too few between.
In the college town I am in I have thought a really cool bar would be a library/bar, designed for study groups, where you could bring a good non-fiction book and get a free drink or discount on one, and have an attached sleep-pod structure to encourage people to not drive drunk. Less sports bars, more intellectual bars...
>Less sports bars, more intellectual bars...
You're in the wrong country for that kind of thing. Americans don't like intellectualism. Just look at our elections.
Americans in college towns probably tolerate or perhaps, yes, even like 'intellectualism'. A bar like that could very well become a community institution and reputable business. Have some perspective.
The problem with that idea is that 1) college students don't have a whole lot of money to spend on establishments like that, and 2) the profitability of such places is poor, compared to places that serve a LOT of alcohol and don't require as much floor space. The cost per square foot of commercial real estate these days is very high, so it just isn't profitable to have an establishment where there's plenty of space (so it isn't a crowded, noisy din), people can spend lots of time relaxing, quietly socializing, working on their laptop, etc., and they don't have to spend a lot of money. It's why Starbucks are all small and crowded, and coffee shops that attempt to buck this don't do so well. You can't pay the rent easily when people have nice lounge chairs and camp out with their laptops and only buy a coffee drink and a small snack. By contrast, look at how bars and restaurants operate: bars serve high-priced alcoholic drinks and customers don't usually stay long, and are crowded. Restaurants are fairly crowded, serve high-priced meals and push hard to get you to buy high-priced alcoholic drinks, and are very pushy to get you out the door so they can clear the table for the next customer.
>First off - are you like sixteen years old?
I'm not even going to honor that insult with an answer.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/02/bars_a...
It's interesting how they came to be so widespread, helped their local communities, and starting creating regional dishes (like Ginger Beef)
After departing, the entire family said (paraphrasing), "WTF was that? That was about as Irish as a mariachi playing a didgeridoo."
They didn't even get a "you tried" sticker.
Mostly, we don't care about authenticity in restaurants. We just want thematic consistency. And the theme for an "Irish pub" is fish and chips, Guinness stew, and marginally classier decor than the rathole bar down the street. We know, deep down, that Outback Steakhouse is really only Australia-themed, rather than authentically Australian. But you'd better not break character when you're running one, buddy. You have to keep those stupid boomerangs nailed up on the walls.
And that's all the phenomenon is. It's a brand identity. It says "inexpensive, but not cheap", and it says "comfort food", and it says "automatic seasonal business every March".
On return I then give these to my Irish mother ...she not being a fan of the "authentic" "Irish" bar experience is what makes this funny.
I am a bad son.
[1] Not counting actual Irish pubs in actual Irland. ;)