Dawson’s Lounge

I spent the New Year’s Eve weekend as usual in Dublin with a brunch in the Westin and a bunch of cocktails in their Mint Bar.

The night before I finally made it to Dawson’s Lounge. Dawson’s Lounge is located on Dawson Street, just a step away from St Stephen’s Green and around the corner from Grafton Street. It is advertised as Dublin’s smallest pub and I was previously jinxed in always visiting Dublin the few days when they were closed for some private functions. So I was pretty excited to finally find it open.

It sure was worth the wait. I absolutely love pubs with an atmosphere, and this little bar sure was oozing with it. You enter through a very narrow set of stairs that lead down to a little room that is vaguely reminiscent of a private living room and can be considered chockablock once you have a dozen people or so inside. The atmosphere was great and we soon got talking to a bunch of people from all over the place and fell out the door a few hours later to wake up with a severe hangover afterwards.

I always enjoy exploring new pubs in Dublin. True, Temple Bar is overrated and only bearable on some quiet afternoons and needs to be avoided like the plague during the weekends or other busy nights. Nevertheless, Dublin still has a large share of old fashioned pubs that don’t seem to be majorly touched by new trends in bar design. That always comes as a pleasant surprise for me as here in Cork pretty much most of the city centre pubs over the last ten years have been remodelled, modernised and refurbished and often turned into super pubs that bear little resemblance to their older predecessors. Dublin on the other hand still has more than their fair share of relaxing hang outs where you still find time for a chat with the owners or other fellow drinkers.

As nicely developed as Dublin’s pub scene still is, a visit to one of the Porterhouse bars reconfirmed what I long suspected: The Irish brewery scene is pretty much dead. OK, we still have Irish beer, but all the major breweries now belong to foreign companies:

Guinness? Diageo!
Murphys? Heineken!
Beamish & Crawford? Scottish and Newcastle!

Little wonder so that the Porthouse Brewery can now claim to be “Ireland’s largest genuine brewery”.

But let’s not ponder too much on the implications of Globalisation.

Instead I would like to wish you all

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR AND A PROSPEROUS 2007!!!

My resolution for this year: To get this blog updated much more regularly.

The Hi-B

THE Hi-B
108 Oliver Plunkett Street, Cork
Tel: 021-4272758

The Hi-B is the stuff of legend in Cork City, one of the few bars that has neither changed ownership over the last few decades nor been seriously renovated or remodelled. Owned by a local eccentric, Brian O’Donnell, it is at first hard to find: It is right opposite the General Post Office (GPO), in a corner house, a few gloomy stairs up on the first floor on top of Minihan’s Chemist. Once found, however, it can become seriously addictive. In size and interior design reminiscent of a cosy old-fashioned living room it is frequented by all ranks of life: writers, artists, would-be writers and –artists, bankers as well as homeless people, rich and poor all flock in to subject themselves to Brian’s iron rules. No mobiles allowed, no chewing gum, and order non-alcoholic drinks at your own mercy: “For Chrissakes, this is a public house, not a coffee bar!” The sign behind the bar says it all: The whipping will continue until morale improves.

Ask any local and they will tell you stories of the Life of Brian. How about the time when he drank someone’s drink after seeing him pour some coals onto the fire. When confronted and told: “Sorry, you just drank my pint”, he answered: “Sorry, but you just used my coals.” Or how about when he was complaining to a motley crew of his only four guests one night, that it is impossible to make a living in the bar trade these days, yet when a group of ten new customers came in all at once he threw them all out, as he couldn’t face THAT much extra work all of a sudden?

This may at first sound harsh, but truth of the matter is that this is one of the few surviving pub relics left remaining, where you can enter at any given time and are guaranteed to find an ear to listen to. The weirder the stories you can tell, the bigger the welcome you will get from the locals.

Plus: These days Brian is no longer that often in his own bar so the rules have relaxed a little bit over the last few years. The standard classical and opera music in the background is now often replaced by jazz or 50s crooners.

So go in have a few pints, enquire in hushed tones about some of Brian’s shenanigans, but please, don’t take it personal if you end up getting barred on your first or subsequent visit over breaking one of the unwritten regulations. It’s all part of the game and you may even make it into local folklore.

Needless to say: This is my favourite pub in town.