A great licensee makes us forget that anyone is running the pub
I usually have a hectic schedule on these trips, and never more so than this time. But often my favourite part is when I carve out an hour to duck out on my own, become anonymous in a strange city, find an ordinary bar that sells ordinary beer, and do my barfly routine.
No trip to North America is complete without it. I take a stool at the bar, making sure I have a good view of the TV, which simply must be showing baseball, and settle in with a good book.
The servers are always friendly, informal, and responsive to your mood. A beer arrives on a coaster, carefully presented. There’s never a crush at the bar; it’s always mellow. When there’s just an inch or so left in the bottom of the glass, the server will casually ask if I want another, and along it comes, without me having to struggle to attract attention.
The first time you drink here a dollar a drink tip seems outrageous, but you quickly start to think of it as good value for the service you receive.
I split my time between reading and trying to make sense of baseball — something that is becoming a lifelong mission. I refuse any attempts to explain it to me — I want to figure it out for myself as a test of my intelligence. So far, I’ve come up wanting. I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on, and I love it.
The servers are perfectly attentive. If it’s clear I want to be left alone to read, they stand a respectful distance away. If I am watching the game, they watch it with me, and if I catch their eye they are happy to have a chat if I want to.
All in all, it is a perfect bar experience, with its very own unique codes and quirks.
Pretty much the only thing that interrupts my baseball-themed reverie is the good-night text from my wife, which will invariably include details of a trip across the road to the White Hart, who was in there, what was happening, what the regulars were up to, what cask ale was on. And suddenly it makes me feel desolately homesick.
And so this time I get to thinking: along with pretty much everyone else in the British beer and pub industry, I routinely trot out the line that British pubs are unique in the world, better than the bars you get anywhere else, the main attraction for any foreign tourist after the latest antics of the royal family.
Sitting in a perfect North American urban bar, a drinking environment I dearly love, what does the British pub really have that’s better than this?
I could make a case that the barfly thing is actually better in a lot of ways. But much as I love it, I don’t, on balance, prefer it (I would be short-lived as a columnist for this magazine if I did). Rather than rhetoric or simple allegiance though, being over here I feel an obligation to come up with solid reasons why the British pub is superior.
Both pub and bar are careworn, lived in, with their own routines and rituals and institutional memories — we don’t have a monopoly on that.
The service may not be as attentive or polite in the pub, but then I’m not expected to tip a quid a drink in return for it.
That’s not much, but it leads me to something. I feel like the pub is ‘my’ space more that a bar ever could. The bar is a very friendly, very well executed commercial transaction, and the pub feels like more than that.
If a publican asked if I wanted another when I hadn’t yet finished the pint in my hand, somehow I’d be less impressed — I might even think they were being pushy, like I’m obliged to keep drinking. Pubs aren’t like that. In a pub, everything runs on my time — well, until last orders anyway.
A good pub licensee runs a benign dictatorship — my house, my rules. But a great licensee makes you forget that anyone is running it at all. Authority, rules and discipline are invisible until needed. And as Britain becomes more of a health and safety-obsessed surveillance state, the pub provides a more relaxing antidote than ever before.
I can’t wait to get back.
