Jack McGarry Jr., the 34-year old owner of the Dead Rabbit, one of the Best Bars in the World, is sitting in the passenger seat of a large white van as it lumbers along the River Lagan in Belfast. His father, Jack McGarry Sr., known to all as Senior, is behind the wheel. Senior, who like Junior, grew up in Belfast before relocating to a cottage in Donegal on the northwest coast, is a retired bus driver. He’s a man of grey stubble, sweatpants and few words. For hours this morning, as the pair made their way from Dublin to Belfast, the Jack McGarry’s have exchanged a scant handful of words. “Left here.” “Aye” “Right” “Aye” “Second exit at the circle” “Aye.” Like many Irishmen of the north, they are a terse bunch for whom silence is the landscape and words small houses built irregularly on it. That is, until they reach the pub.
McGarry lives in Paramus, New Jersey but is back in Belfast doing reconnaissance. This year, after taking sole ownership of the Dead Rabbit from his partner Sean Muldoon, he plans on rolling out the bar to Austin and New Orleans. (Rabbits, even dead ones, can’t help but to multiply.) As if to fortify himself for the expansion, he has returned to his homeland—with a warren of Dead Rabbit employees including Ian Alexander, the head barman; Laura Torres, the director of operations; and Aidan Bowie, the beverage director -- to replenish himself at the pubs of his wayward youth. It is true that to most visitors to the Dead Rabbit’s original (and for now only) location in the Financial District, the action is on the second floor cocktail lounge, the Parlor with its erudite cocktails like the Zappa (a high-octane mix of Bushmills and Tullamore D.E.W. whiskies, sherry, Zinfandel and stone fruit) and the Windfall (Irish gin, cucumber, gorse and shiso kombucha). This is, after all, the 31st Best Bar in the World. The Parlor might be the heady choice but, for McGarry, it’s the sawdust-strewn, photograph-covered, pint-heavy Taproom that contains the heart of the Dead Rabbit. “I wanted to open a proper Irish pub in New York,” McGarry said, “not an imitation of one.”
America does not want for Irish pubs. There are, according to Forbes, over 4,000 of them. But there is a paucity of proper ones. The archetypal Irish pub in America hovers just above the dive in prestige, hygiene and ubiquity. They are places one goes to get blotto, where beers are cheap, screens are large and camaraderie, such as there is, lasts as long as the evening’s bender. But the true Irish pub, the one McGarry is on the search for in both Belfast and in America, is, as he calls it, invoking sociologist Ray Oldenburg, “a third place.” That is somewhere that is neither home nor work; that provides continuity, regularity and a sense of place; a locus where broad unstructured time passes however the hell you want it to with whosoever one finds present.
There’s a small gap in the townhouses along the River Lagan. Son grunts left and father complies. The van mumbles down a cobblestoned alley inches wider than its berth. After a few tight turns the alley opens up and we stop at Kelly’s Cellars, one of Belfast’s oldest pubs. Jack jumps out and enters. The ceiling is low, wooden and dark, and the walls are thick, uneven and white. Though the color of the walls is academic since every square inch is covered in photographs and memorabilia. Over one low arched doorway, Céad Míle Fáilte —Irish for One Thousand Welcomes—is written on the wall.
McGarry has been sober since 2016. Though he sips (and spits) cocktails, he completely eschews Guinness. “Guinness was my drink,” he explains, and it’s easy to see why. In Ireland, where per capita alcohol consumption for those 15 and over is 574 pints of beer, drinking Guinness is perhaps the only unifying national pastime. It comes with its own lore and unwritten rules. “The first sip of Guinness,” Senior tells me, “should split the G.” The G being the G in Guinness which is written on a proper glassware, a specially made bell-shaped pint glass shaped thusly so the nitrogenated Guinness achieves a clean unperturbed head in a classic two-part pour. The second sip should half that liquid and the third finish it off. To drink a pint of Guinness in three sips is the mark of a distinction. Men speak of pints downed with the remove and pride of a professional athlete recounting distant feats of yore. But, by large, at Kelly’s Cellars, the regulars are not rowdy nor outwardly sloshed. A quiet amicable chatter fills the air, much as it has since 1720. Jack stands at the bar taking it all in. “Without its people,” he tells me later, “a pub is just four walls.”
An Irish pub differs from an English pub or an American tavern in that there is a certain national melancholy present, a melancholy particularly piquant in the occupied lands of the north. But it chases the Irish back through the Troubles to famines and wars and conquest. As the Irish writer Flann O’Brien wrote, “No genuine Irishman could relax in comfort and feel at home in a pub unless he was sitting in deep gloom on a hard seat with a very sad expression on his face.” But one should not suppose that this melancholy precludes joy. In fact, if forlorn gray is the underpainting, it only serves to make the bright streaks of joy stand out more. This joy has a name, the craic. Craic is the patter, the gossip, the jokes, the aimless words, stories, the endearments and insults that turn a pub from a room with people in it into a third place. Craic is to the Irish what saudade is to the Brazilian or sisu to the Finn, a word so submerged in the culture it can not be fully translated. (The closest approximation is the Yiddish kibbitzing.) The Irish excel at the craic; but rare is the American who does.
This, naturally, presents a dilemma for the American publican like McGarry. So much of what makes an Irish pub Irish in Ireland -- where, by the way, it is just called a pub much like how Connecticut Muffin, in Connecticut, is just called Muffin, right? -- has to do with Ireland itself. Americans, meanwhile, hunger for a devolved Irish-American pub, one steeped not just in booze but with a nostalgic vision of Ireland, encapsulated in the amber of emigrant imagination. And it isn’t just an absence of craic but a generalized horror of unstructured time, a very modern but seemingly irreversible revulsion to in-person interactions, even the rarity of a publican—a pub’s genius loci, an enforcer, a bartender, a sympathetic ear—that make an Irish pub in America nigh on impossible.
Cottoning onto this futility, McGarry has gone in opposite direction. If a classic Irish pub can’t be made in America, maybe a new sort of one can, an Irish pub in America based on Ireland as it is today, and perhaps tomorrow. His visit to Belfast doesn’t stop at Kelly’s Cellars or the century’s old Duke of York, another pub down a Belfast alley. McGarry has convoked a heavily brogued team of Irishmen and women to ferret out contemporary Ireland. Among them are the brand’s new Director of Irish whiskey, Mark McLaughlin, who has been crisscrossing the island in search of whiskey artisans; Ryan Crown, a voluble bespectacled graphic designer who is proving Ireland’s identity goes beyond Celtic Garamond fonts and stenciled harps; and his own good cousin, Liam Craig, a former school teacher now recruited to coordinate live music, focusing on contemporary Irish singer-songwriters. “There’s so much more to this country than just cliches,” he says, over a cocktail made with poitin, an Irish new spirit, at Bar 1661, a Dublin bar that proves his point.
Back at the Dead Rabbit in New York, St. Paddy’s Day is approaching. It closely coincides with the bar’s tenth anniversary in what will prove a pivotal year for the brand. Guinness will, of course, flow in great rushes through the frequently cleaned draught lines into painstakingly prepared pint glasses. They will be drunk to the G, then in half, then gone. Toasts will be made and Slaintes shouted but not just with Bushmills (for Protestants); Jameson (for Catholics) and Tullamore D.E.W. (for aficionados) but with drams of Method & Madness single pot still whiskey and Egan’s Fortitude whiskies too, part of the extensive list of small Irish whiskey producers. Long maligned Irish coffees will still pass over the worn bar but made with beans from a new Galway roaster, Calendar Coffee. Perhaps even the beat of a bodhran and the melodic curls of a fiddle will fill the air but it will take turns with curated playlists of upcoming singer-songwriters. And none of it will drown out the good craic or the fact that it is to Ireland’s present and Ireland’s future that the Dead Rabbit turns as it prepares to hop across the country.
