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.
The bar was originally built on the first first floor in the 1860’s because of the flooding which used to be far more frequent until the Inniscarra Dam was built in the 1950’s. All our electricity sockets in the stores are at ceiling height to protect against flooding.
The Hi-B’s owner and publican Brian O’Donnell was an Irish legend even then — in the 1980s, not the 1860s.
When O’Donnell died last December, the Irish Examiner’s eulogy by Dan Buckley painted a picture of curmudgeonly eccentricity, undoubted erudition and sheer longevity; O’Donnell’s parents had owned the bar since 1924 when he took it over in the early 1960s, and his wife and daughter continued the family tradition when age and ill health compelled him to retire.
Brian’s daughter, Rachel, paid a brief and warm tribute to her father, recalling his enduring curiosity about the world around him. “He bought four newspapers every day,” she told the congregation in her altar eulogy, before adding, with a flourish: “He was as mad as a box of frogs, but we loved him for it.”
O’Donnell was so well known in Ireland that the Dublin newspaper also marked his passing.
His bar … made no concessions for food or...Read more
