Modern Living: Euphoria Is a Pub

In England's good old days, the tavern, like the inn, was a refuge for travelers, providing bed, board, a warming fire and flagons of wine. For Samuel Johnson, who according to legend used the Cheshire Cheese as both club and office, there was "nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced." In the shadow of the tavern there was also the more modest "publick house," whose clients came mainly from the neighborhood. Divided into a public and private saloon bar, the pub usually included a snack bar, called a "snuggery," selling such delicacies as toad-in-the-hole and steak-and-kidney pie.

In the U.S., the pre-Prohibition corner saloon was the closest approximation of the pub, a bastion of masculine fellowship, with free lunch, gleaming spittoons, and an opulent nude over the bar. But what came back after Prohibition was mixed drinking and the thick-carpeted, chromium-cold cocktail lounge. Now, in a reach to recapture some of the old clubby atmosphere, bar-and-grills across the U.S. are making a stab at introducing the English (or Irish or Scottish) pub.

Instant Nostalgia. In most cases the results are decor-thin imitations, with euphonious Olde English names, a few Tiffany lamp shades, perhaps a portrait of Churchill or a boar's-bristle dart board that no one knows how to use.

But, astonishingly, the vogue seems to be catching on. In recent months, two dozen pubs have opened in Manhattan, bearing names redolent of instant nostalgia, like Molly Mog's and the Jolly Six Pence. Five have opened in Atlanta, others are hanging out signs in Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

One of the most popular is Charley O's in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. It is not a pub that any Irishman would recognize but, as Restaurant & Waldorf Associates puts it, "the kind of pub an Irishman might like to open if he came to New York." The owners poked about Dublin absorbing atmosphere, installed kegs of Irish Harp beer on draft in order to create what the owners like to think is "a womb with a brew." Somehow the globe lamps, corned-beef and 5¢ meatball sandwiches, and stand-up tables seem to have done the trick.

Charley O's is now grossing $25,000 a week.

Bowling on the Green. Other pub owners have gone all out for authenticity. Before opening the Blue Boar in Los Angeles' fashionable restaurant row on La Cienega, Bernard G. Tohl and his wife spent months researching historic pubs in London, copied the best features of 100 of them in the Boar.

San Francisco's White Horse Taverne prides itself on being a faithful copy of the Edinburgh original. The Golden Bee in Colorado Springs' Broadmoor Hotel is not a copy; it's the real thing—a 150-year-old English pub that had been dismantled and shipped to New York, where the hotel's decorators found it gathering dust in a warehouse.