Irish themes
Sunday 31 March 2002
Around here a lot of hotel bars are turning Irish. It seems you can pull in more drinkers by calling your bar Molly O'Somebody's Irish Pub and laying on draught Guinness and fake timber beams. This piece from Dublin makes me curious; what does a themed bar look like when it's in Ireland?:
Returning from the city centre, I was walking down Capel Street. The former furniture shop Forsye & Forsye is applying for planning permission for a bar. It definitely has the grand facade for a Dublin bar, but will we end up with another massive theme Bar like Zanzibar? I believe that the rear of the building is listed — inside the store, you could see iron columns holding up the upper floors of what seems to be have been an old grain store. On the same street, the recently refurbished Slattery's has the most incongruous little glass dome over its entrance — looks like one of those see-through umbrellas from the 1970s.