RecipeMuncher

www.nytimes.com

“A good pub is a place devoted to conversation, with drink as the lubricant,” Mr. Barich said one evening last week. “In an American bar, the minute you finish your drink they say, ‘Do you want another?’ You’d never see that in a good pub.”

In years past, an Irish pub was a family-run business, and the publican more than likely lived upstairs — an arrangement that created an intimacy across the bar.

“A good publican is a person with character, concerned about the welfare of patrons,” Mr. Barich said. That a barman could aspire to one day own a pub himself made for a system of dues paying that also resulted in better service.

But with trophy pubs now commanding as much as $8 million, a shift has been made to partnerships or corporations that may own and manage several bars. At the same time, more Irish are drinking wine, and drinking at home or in restaurants, chipping away at the social relevance of pubs.

The changes are most pronounced in the countryside, where verdant fields gave way to suburban sprawl in a period of rampant economic growth (now considerably tamed) known as the Celtic Tiger. The farmers who once treated rural pubs as community centers are selling off their fields, or else being frightened away from the barstool by strict drunken driving laws. “The loss of those country pubs signifies a huge change,” Mr. Barich said.

I think I have to love this quote the best and strongly agree.

“Nobody wants drunks in Irish pubs because they’re boring,” he said, “and the last thing you want to be called is boring.”

Instead, traditional pubs foster warmth and fraternity.

“For the couple of hours that you’re in there,” Mr. Kirwan said, “you mesh with this community and your personal troubles are shed.”