“There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-so-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar-even in this fake-ass Irish pub. It’s new, built to look old. Erin Go Braugh bullshit with it’s four flat screens silently flashing sports crawls for games I don’t care about. The generic Irish bric-a-brac they deliver by the truck-load. Empty moving vans roaming the Irish countryside right now, I imagine, waiting for old Missus Meagher to drop dead into her black pudding so they can buy up the contents of her curio shelves. All of it shipped straight off to a central clearing house, where it is divvied up between Instant Irish Pubs in New York, Milwaukee, Singapore, Verona.
I’ve been at this bar before, of course. We all have. Yet I’m strangely, indefensively happy here. Even the stink of Lysol from the too-clean floor, the fruit flies hovering over the garnish tray do not distract me from a general feeling of well-being.
Bushmills or Jameson, Celtics or Rangers, don’t mean a thing here. This is a nondenominational Irish bar. No difference no raised eyebrows. Few Irish, now that I think about it. And the Guinness, of course blows.
The owner’s got ten or twelve of these bars and they all look the same and they all have names like Paddy McGee’s or Seamus O’Doul’s or Molly whatever-none of whom exist or ever existed.
Among the pool table, the juke box, the inevitable dartboard, the moose head, toy trains, Yankee banners, the photos of Irish authors who never came here and whom nobody here ever read. You want to talk Joyce or Behan? A Yeats’s bust may sit dust-covered on a shelf, but start spouting lines from The Second Coming and you can just fuck off down the street, ya prat.”
-excerpt from “I Drink Alone” Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food & the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain
My first week in Istanbul, I found myself at one of these ‘fake-ass’ Irish pubs in Taksim, down an old, crooked alley. It was named the James Joyce and, it being my first week in Turkey, I understand Turkish about as well as most of the world’s population understands Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. (If you’ve never taken a look inside Finnegan’s Wake, the next time you’re in a book store, if you are one of the precious few who still visit bookstores, open it up and give it a whirl.)
I was with my co-worker, Alex, recently arrived from Orange County. Alex is 25 and he is a fellow fan of Jameson Irish Whiskey. We were on our way home from an outing to Asia (oh, did I forget to tell you that I went to Asia?), and we decided to pop into the James Joyce to satisfy our craving for one of our favorite adult beverages. We walk into the “pub” to witness 2 Turkish men playing acoustic versions of Radiohead, REM, and Willie Nelson songs. We take a table in the back and each get a Guinness and a Jameson. We sit there for a couple of hours getting to know each other. We talk music, California, travel…. Mostly music….
The table next to us turns over a couple of times as we sit there, each party speaking English. Men in business suits, primarily. I admit that I had a modicum of guilt sitting there in this “pub.” This is usually the kind of place I only visit after I’ve been somewhere foreign long enough to feel that I’ve ‘earned’ something kitschy. By my standards, I haven’t been in Istanbul long enough to be in a place like this. It made me feel even more like a tourist than I already did. That said, Alex wanted to come here, and I did find it valuable to bond with him over Radiohead covers and lukewarm Guinness.
After two Guinness each, we decide its time to go home. We get our bill (hesap, in Turkish). Our bill is 170 Lira. Do the math on this: we had 6 drinks between the two of us. This puts each drink at roughly 30TL each, or $15. A $15 Guinness? We call over our server and he shows us that, indeed, our beers were 30TL apiece and our Jamesons were 25TL. Damn.
I guess when you’re importing Missus Meagher’s curios directly from Ireland, costs really add up.
Moral of the story: Always look at a menu before you order.
Life lesson: Stay away from ‘fake-ass Irish pubs.’
Duly Noted.
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