by Bill Barich
As a budding regular, I gradually became aware of how much effort goes into the upkeep of a first-rate pub. It reflected a conscientious attitude toward service, as well as a desire to preserve and protect a costly piece of real estate. The attention to detail was extraordinary. Every morning without fail, a staff member polished the brass ledges below the windows outside, rubbing away all the smudges and fingerprints to restore a burnished glow. The colorful petunias that spilled from hanging planters needed to be watered, while the lunch specials had to be chalked on a blackboard and vetted, not always successfully. Along with greengrocers, who may earn an even lower grade—turnups, carots, I’ve seen them all—some pub employees wrestle with their spelling.
The kitchen at Birchall’s dished up standard belly-busting fare rather than the effete wraps and panini featured on more au courant menus. Boiled bacon with parsley sauce, shepherd’s pie, chicken curry, and the peculiar combo of lasagna and chips were the staples. Irish pubs didn’t start cooking full meals until about twenty years ago—and some still don’t, especially in the country, where a publican might glare at you if you ask for a bite to eat—but food represents a significant part of the business around Dublin. At Smyths, where both lunch and dinner are served, it constitutes about 30 percent of the gross receipts, but Birchall’s lagged far behind, perhaps because the customers were so single-minded about their purpose—talk and drink, that is—and so set in their ways.
Once the brasses were polished, the pub’s interior required some attention. The bare floors of wood and slate had to be mopped, the bottles and shelves were dusted, and a barman ran a vacuum over the carpeted areas. (The different floor surfaces, installed in different periods, contributed to Birchall’s cobbled-together look. The pub hadn’t been designed in advance, just added on to, and that was part of its charm.) Emptying a score of ashtrays used to be a nasty aspect of the ritual, but that stopped when a ban on smoking took effect in 2004. The ban had hurt some pubs, particularly “landlocked” ones in the inner city with no outdoor space. Smokers were bothered by the inconvenience, and many of them didn’t want to announce their presence at a bar by standing in front of it for a cigarette. Smyths had room in back for a “beer garden,” though, with patio heaters and picnic tables, and saw its profits increase. For barmen, the ban was a blessing. Liberated from the clouds of second-hand smoke, they felt healthier, brighter, and much more energetic.
Birchall’s was so neat, spotless, and odorless by ten thirty, the opening hour, you might imagine the pub had hosted a dowager’s tea party the night before. The petty griefs, the awkward flirtations, the loudmouth who insisted Italy rather than Brazil had won the World Cup in 1994 and knocked over his beer, they’d all been erased. This diligent act of erasure amounted to a canny psychological ploy. When the cops drag a criminal back to the scene of the crime, his fondest wish is that there won’t be any scene, just a miracle whereby the evidence has vanished and left instead an antiseptic motel room or a forest glen absent of malice. It’s the same with pubs. If you misbehave—and the odds are that you might—you don’t care to be reminded of your orneriness on your next visit. It’s much nicer to walk into an obsessively hygenic local and pretend the slate is clean again.
During the week, Birchall’s is as quiet as a chapel until the lunch hour, and nearly as quiet after that. From the depths of Ranelagh, a straggly, fuzzy-tongued loner might emerge in search of some hair of the dog, but the first regulars don’t arrive before the early evening. All-day drinkers of the Tommy Lusty school are few and far between, because many of the Irish have good jobs and fat salaries—and even fatter mortgages and bills to pay. They can’t afford to slack off, and when they do drink, they frequently do it at home. The sale of wine has skyrocketed at off-licenses, or stores permitted to sell alcoholic beverages for consumption off the premises. Wine commands 21 percent of the market now, while the discount beer available at supermarkets—beer makes up only half the market at present, down from 69 percent in 1986—is much cheaper than a pint at the pub.
If you want to see the last of the early-morning drinkers, you have to visit a pub such as Ned’s of Townsend Street, not far from the Liffey. Built in 1861, Ned’s has a long history and an old custom of inviting valued employees to inscribe their names on a beam in the cellar. As an early house, it holds a license that allows it to open at seven A.M. to serve people “following the trade of their calling,” originally dock workers on the quays along the river. Some dockers still come in, but the port’s high-tech now, so they’re technicians, not laborers, and they’re joined by others who work a night shift—cabbies, pressmen from the Irish Times, bakers who often bring a box of rolls or buns fresh from the oven. There’s a fair contingent of the neighborhood’s elderly, too, who like to savor their drinks while the city’s half-asleep and the threats that they fear, real or imagined, are dormant. They play cards, read the paper, and vanish before noon.
By all accounts, the dockers of yore were the most truly heroic pintmen Dublin has ever known. When you read about their exploits, you become a little dizzy yourself. A docker might start with a couple of pints even before he hoisted a crate or a steamer trunk, then take a break for a pint or two at ten o’clock, the “beero hour,” and toss down another ration of suds with his lunch at home. Needless to say, he was still thirsty at quitting time and marched right back to the pub, where he communed with his brethren until the exhausted and probably relieved publican shut down. Oddly, some dockers had a bias against whiskey drinkers. They poked fun at their red faces and accused the men of being “culchies,” or rubes fresh off the farm.
As I did at McSorley’s, I liked to drop by Birchall’s around six o’clock. A dozen or so suspects were usually deployed around the room, divided evenly between those who had just left the office and those who no longer had one, gents in their seventies who were the most punctual regulars by far. Due to their undeniable seniority, they could be both proprietary and territorial, advising Jack on questions of policy and glancing up with a sharp crick of the neck whenever the door swung open. If they recognized a familiar face, they were quick with a nod and a hello, but a stranger provoked scant curiosity. They drank Guinness, of course, because they’d been weaned on it, but stout only accounts for about 45 percent of the beer sold in Dublin pubs now, or the same amount as lager, with such brands as Bud and Coors Light currently in fashion. Hard cider, wine, and spirits account for the other 10 percent.
At first I was thrown off stride when a barman greeted me by asking, “Are you okay?” I thought I must look sickly or otherwise in distress, but the question only meant, “What would you like to drink?” implying that you couldn’t be okay, not really, until you named your poison. I also had some difficulty adapting to the level of service. It was too good—unobtrusive, polite, discreet. No matter where I sat, the barman brought the pint to my table and refused to accept a tip. That’s customary, but it still took some getting used to. I’d distributed a small fortune to American bartenders just for popping the cap on a beer bottle.
Once I was okay, I tried to avoid getting caught at the craic-heavy front bar, where it’s almost impossible to avoid the ancient practice of trading rounds, a system of reciprocity that fosters “dutiful, ritualistic drinking,” according to a sociologist critical of it. If you meet a friend, he’ll treat you to a pint, and you’re obliged to do the same for him, but if a third party enters the fray, it spells trouble for a two-pint man. Worse still, if your little band of comrades is sufficiently jolly, you’ll attract some hangers-on, and that leads to more pints, because the Irish are drawn to sociability like moths to a flame. The writer Benedict Kiely, on holiday in Dublin, once remarked that while he strolled the seventy-five yards from O’Connell Bridge to the White Horse Bar, fourteen people invited him to have a drink.
When it came to the rounds system, I had a nemesis—Moriarity, the photographer, as I’ll call him. He seldom drank at Birchall’s, preferring the artsy central pubs where young women gather, s
o I rarely saw him, and though I enjoyed his company, I regretted the times he’d corralled me. Bearded and graying, with a full head of curly hair, Moriarity played the rascal to the hilt, but he was also a brilliant talker on painting, literature, politics, and so on. When we first met, purely by chance, the conversation was so stimulating I finished my third pint before I knew it, and that forced me to ask for another round, after which the demonic Moriarity snuck in a fifth pint—he must have whispered the order, because I didn’t hear it—and thereby committed me to a sixth, although I begged off by citing my status as a blow-in who lacked the capacity of certain citizens of the Republic.
Too much sociability can be a killer. As the speed of the rounds escalates, you feel surrounded by an invisible force field. Why won’t your feet move? What malign neural malfunction prevents you from leaving? H. L. Mencken’s Dictionary of the American Language supplies a long list of slang terms for being drunk, but the Irish are no slouches, either. They’re spannered, rat-arsed, cabbaged, and hammered; ruined, legless, scorched, and blottoed; or simply trolleyed or sloshed. In Kerry, you’re said to be flamin’; in Waterford, you’re in the horrors; and in Cavan, you’ve gone baloobas, a tough one to wrap your tongue around if you are baloobas. In Donegal, you’re steamin’, while the afflicted in Limerick are out of their tree. Those who suffer in Louth have taken a ride on the bingo bus.
Overindulgence of the garden variety is no sin in the eyes of most publicans, though, unless you’re sloppy, cause a scene, bug the other customers, are verbally abusive, or pick a fight. (If a man takes off his jacket, he’s praying the fight won’t happen, says the lore.) Still, a tiny number of people at any pub turn into awful pests. The reasons for their profligacy are legion, but a publican has just one option to counteract it—he must bar the offender, sometimes for life. (The term “eighty-sixed” isn’t used in Ireland, but the phrase “on the wagon” has an Irish link. W. A. McIntire, New York’s sanitation commissioner, collected drunks with a water wagon in 1910.) I know a publican who has barred hundreds over the past forty years, and he once confided how delicate the process can be.
You can’t pounce in the heat of the moment, he told me. Barring is a cagey affair. The guilty party, showing off to a crowd, will be full of bravado, so you have to play a waiting game and sandbag him later when he’s alone, vulnerable, and—ideally—hungover. In most cases, he’s already been issued a warning, but he’ll still grovel, protest, and try to enlist his mates as character witnesses. This is useless, because the mates are afraid they’ll be barred, too. The offender’s left to dangle. He racks his brain for the perfect excuse to be reinstated and hits on it at last—a family funeral! (The second most common excuse is the desperate need to watch a big football match with the guys.) The mourners will adjourn to the pub after the ceremony, he whines, but the plea falls on deaf ears. Motion denied! Only a half dozen times has my publican friend ever reversed a decision.
Around nine o’clock, Birchall’s slides into a mellow middle zone that precedes the calamitous scramble for drinks at last call. Women have filtered into the pub by now, on their own or with a partner, and that was inconceivable as late as the 1960s. Until the Equal Status Act of 2000 made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, many publicans could and did ban women from the premises, or confine them to a snug. (Country matchmakers, operating in a time warp, still use these screened-off private alcoves to broker marriages.) To get around such obstacles, a woman might pass a jug through the door, or send a child to have it filled. During the nineteenth century, they began to frequent spirit grocers, where alcohol, primarily cheap gin, was sold with the tea, butter, and eggs. These “gin palaces,” tastefully appointed, with soft gas lighting, were luxurious compared to the dingy, grimy local of the period as captured, once again, by Flann O’Brien, who knew whereof he spoke.
“No Irishman could feel at home in a pub,” O’Brien wrote, “unless he was sitting in deep gloom on a hard seat with a very sad expression on his face, listening to the drone of bluebottle squadrons carrying out a raid on the yellow sandwich cheese.”
Women are welcome at most pubs these days. Some pubs even court them with plush furnishings. From an economic standpoint, they’re a valuable asset, because they tend to ask for wine or spirits, a more expensive proposition than Guinness. If they do order stout, they may opt for a “ladylike” glass, the word for a half pint in Ireland, rather than a full one. At Birchall’s, a pint of Guinness costs about $6.30—lager is higher—while a glass costs about $3.75, so the house wins again. An astute publican keeps a tally of such statistics in his or her head, and can put a price tag on every regular. Someone who drinks three pints of stout five nights a week spends about five thousand a year, and that’s one reason why the eccentricities of some customers are so readily tolerated.
Over the next few months, I bellied up to the bar at Birchall’s and estimated my annual worth at about $1,500, a mere drop in the bucket. Like most regulars, I also became hyperaware of the pub’s routine and noticed the slightest change in it. If the stout was a little too cold, or the lights a little too bright, I registered the divergence as sensitively as a seismograph, although not all the changes were so discreet. The most sweeping concerned the bar’s staff. When I arrived in Dublin, the city was overwhelmingly white and Irish, but immigrants were pouring into the country from such new EU member states as Poland and Romania, as well as from places like China, India, and Russia, and often they were young, ambitious, and eager for the entry-level jobs at pubs that Ireland’s young people usually snub now because they have far better options.
So it was that Birchall’s hired a Chinese man and woman, both in their twenties, as floor staff, the rough equivalent of waiters. They circled during the busy evening hours to deliver drinks, collect the empties, and take the pressure off the frazzled barmen. The woman left abruptly, but Zhang Ning, reinvented as Andy, stayed on, and through his grit and intelligence, he rose to the position of a full-fledged barman with a decent rate of pay. Andy is compact, witty, and totally acculturated, admired for his banter and his cool, dressed in the hippest threads he can afford and capable of a showy haircut, but tourists are sometimes surprised when they see him behind the bar.
An official at the Irish Tourist Board once expressed a slight concern about all the foreigners working in pubs, because when the Kellys from Cleveland travel to Ireland as “roots tourists” to look up their ancestors at the National Library, they expect Seamus O’Halloran to pull their pint—not Andy, who doesn’t have red hair, freckles, or any other attribute of the stage Irishman. (This is short-sighted of the official, of course. The Chinese chef at Smyths cooks the best Irish stew in Ranelagh.) As for Andy, he’s accustomed to how much the customers drink, a lot by the standards of China, but he doesn’t judge and feels grateful for the chance to start a new life. It would be nice if Dublin had a Zhang Ning pub someday, but Andy’s content for the moment and so accepted by everybody that he hosts a karaoke night during the Ranelagh Arts Festival every autumn.
If the regulars adapted easily to Andy, they were saddened and a bit unmoored when Jack Birchall chose to retire. “A shock to the system,” I heard somebody say. Maybe Jack’s intimates knew about his decision, but I only learned of it after the pub was sold. Again, there was no sign posted to tip me off. The deal was private, and among the principals was Frank Smyth of Smyths, who had a partner and presented an offer at just the right time, when Jack was ready to quit and enjoy life. His four grown children, three daughters and a son, had no desire to take over the pub—that’s generally the case in publicans’ families these days. The children have far better options, too, and prefer to invest their inheritance elsewhere rather than put in long, tedious hours listening to the scintillating opinions of folks like me.
I bumped into Jack not long after the deal had closed. He had a better tan than ever and was about to fly to Biarritz for a two-week summer holiday, and if he missed his bar rag, it didn’t show. Frank Smyth was in the
thick of it, though, with two pubs to run instead of one. If you watch Frank in action, you’d never figure him as an owner. He works so tirelessly, and at such a brisk pace, you assume he’s trying to impress the boss and earn a promotion. Jack made the task look effortless and carried it off with savoir faire, but Frank, who’s much younger, hurries and scurries, as if he’s late for an important meeting. He’s a barman of the professional school, too, and had started with Jack in the Liberties, then spent fourteen years at Birchall’s before he opened Smyths in 2000.
As a pro, Frank understood he’d be treading on eggshells with the gang at Birchall’s. They’d subject his every move to intense scrutiny. When he displayed some harmless rugby jerseys for a spot of color, one regular accused him of a lapse in taste. The jerseys were “too in your face,” he was told. I didn’t care about the rugby gear myself, but I was mildly disconcerted about the new toasted sandwiches. Toasties are a staple at most pubs and come in many varieties—cheese, ham-and-cheese, and ham-cheese-tomato-and-onion, the vaunted “special,” for example—and though they’re exactly what the doctor didn’t order, I became addicted to them. There’s no better pub lunch than a toastie and a pint, although you may fall asleep afterward and wake up a fat man, as I nearly did until I kicked the habit.
On Jack’s watch, the toasties were prepared from scratch. Jack was a genius at it, really. He layered the ingredients neatly, clamped the sandwich into a mesh grill, and popped it into a toaster. There was never a false move. He never retracted the grill before the cheese had melted, an oversight that occurs more often than you’d like to believe. Next he cut the toastie into quarters, each scorched with lovely grill marks, and sprinkled a garnish of potato chips on the plate, but Frank quite sensibly began to import ready-made toasties from his award-winning kitchen down the block. The sandwiches, wrapped in cellophane, were more hygenic, he said, and so foolproof even the clumsiest barman could heat one in a toaster oven without any fuss.
