VinePair:
Specialized firms like The Irish Pub Company (IPC) and ÓL Irish Pubs Ltd., both based in Dublin and backed by Guinness, along with smaller, more locally focused outfits like Love Irish Pubs, have helped install prefab pubs everywhere from small-town Ireland to Lagos, Nigeria.
Drinking in these retrofitted spaces is oddly comforting, akin to visiting Colonial Williamsburg or MGM Studios in Orlando. Fake-real pubs have unusual, undeniable appeal: They are grounded in something tangible and knowable, yet they exist apart from reality, and free from chaos and uncertainty.
Can these artificial Irish pubs be everything we want them to be? (Yes, of course they can. That’s the point.)
Even though many are “cookie cutter”, I still love the look and feel of a “true” Irish pub. My favorite was a hole in the wall Irish place in New York City off of Times Square we found during one Macworld Expo. Everyone who worked in the pub was actually from Ireland, many with accents so thick we could barely understand them. We closed the place down over several nights.
Don’t blink; a lot of pubs in NYC aren’t anywhere near as old as they’ve been made to look. And those prefab instapubs have been around for quite some time.
At least McSorley’s still there.
“Everyone who worked in the pub was actually from Ireland, many with accents so thick we could barely understand them.”
And intriguingly, many, if not most of them, were working illegally.
It’s strange how no one seemed to find it necessary to build a wall along the Atlantic.
“…from small-town Ireland to Lagos, Nigeria.”
We all know that the largest market for Guinness is…
Not Ireland. It’s the UK.
Less well known is that the 2nd biggest market isn’t Ireland, either.
It’s Nigeria.
The UK think isn’t surprising as the UK has 15x the population of Ireland. There are 50% more people with Irish grandparents in the UK than live in all of RoI. The Nigeria thing is pretty crazy though.
Nigeria isn’t that surprising, in the sense that the population is about 4x larger than the UK, but it’s not just that. Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda are all large Guinness markets, actually with their own recipe.
There’s even a large market for “stout-flavored” (I forget the exact adjective) non-alcoholic beverages, particularly through West Africa. I find them hideous, but apparently they appeal to something in the African palate.