Four years ago, when George Hogland, Sean Doheny, and Pat Cummings invited 25 drinking chums to pile onto a bus and spend a day hunting for the best Irish bar on the south side of Chicago, they intended the excursion to be a cultural enterprise, not a vomit-inducing pub crawl. “We’ve got five or six guys here who’ve brought their sons out with them,” said Cummings. “It’s about heritage, it’s about tradition. We don’t get belligerent. We’re mostly lawyers, police officers, businessmen–just a lot of good guys from the south side.”
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“Now, Jack Desmond’s was a fine bar,” Cummings said. He promised the crew he’d tell some “true stories”–long, blue jokes, often about funerals–if they’d settle down to rate the first contender in four categories: atmosphere, stock (“Was the Guinness piss?”), service (“Were they fed up with us or were they cordial?”), and decor.
There was one more stop south of the Loop: the Kerry Piper in Willowbrook, the champion two years running. Cummings said he was looking forward to the downtown bars, as the new candidates had wanted in badly enough to promise a decent “palm greasing.” It looked like they’d have a rough time outbidding the Kerry Piper, though. The thump and whine of live drums and bagpipes poured from the bar as the lads filed in, the owner rubbed elbows with the Larkin Brothers onstage, and the Piper passed out custom T-shirts listing all the pubs on the circuit.
“Be ready to be treated like royalty,” said Cummings.
Next was Lizzie McNeill’s, tucked under a condo building near North Pier; independently owned, it smelled like the nearby swimming pool but won points for giving the lads the run of the place and treating them to a performance by the senior girls from the Lavin-Cassidy school of Irish dance. Cummings said this was more like it–he’d wanted something “cultural” at each bar. The show didn’t go on till the pints were handed out; when the thin recording of Irish music came on the judges hushed up and fought for sight lines with the internationally acclaimed troupe’s sharp-elbowed mothers. They clapped and stomped, eventually falling in with the click of the delicate, nervous-faced dancers’ shoes on the hardwood floor as, behind the girls, fresh footage of the brutal scaffolding crash at the Hancock flashed on a big-screen TV. The tour then boarded the bus for Fado, a two-story pub just down Clark from the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s.
“Pat, have you got my phone? No? Then someone else on this bus has my phone. I want my fucking phone!”
