The Spring 2024 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online.
The following essay originally appeared as a “Hip Hops” column on May 18, 2020 — the height of the pandemic.
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An inviting barroom shifts the perspective of the traveler from the expansive outside world looking in, to the insider’s viewpoint looking back out … at times, quite tightly.
Five thousand miles away, you enter a cozy room in a strange town and ask for a tankard of ale or lager. Your education commences. The late ward-heeling Boston politician Tip O’Neill rather famously commented that all politics is local, and in like fashion, my proclivities lead me inexorably to a conclusion, oft times verified.
All beer drinking culture is local.
In 1987 my friend Barrie and I visited the city of Cork, Ireland. In the throes of powerful thirsts, we entered the building situated at 108 Oliver Plunkett Street, climbed the stairs to the first floor (?), and beheld the atmospheric majesty of the Hi-B (Hibernian) Bar.
Somewhere up or down another set of stairs was the loo.
