The Pre-Requisite Drinking Experience: the Boston-Irish Bar
- January 12, 2009
- Rated 3 of 5 by
notso62 from Boston, Massachusetts
There is a group of "new-school" Irish bars in Boston that are very popular with the upper-20s to mid-30s crowd. These bars are owned by a common development group that transformed these once-dives into slick reinterpretations of the Boston Irish-bar experience. Lir is one of the bars owned by this group.
Lir is located at the end of Boylston Street, making it convenient to students of Northeastern and Boston Universities, several T stops on the Green Line and residents of the gentrified south end. It is also the usual location of the beginning of a Boylston Street bar crawl as perpetrated by my friends and I on several occasions. Most of the clientele at Lir tends to be in their mid to late 20’s. On my several occasions to visit this location, it seemed like males out-numbered females 2-to-1, but that might have just been because those were nights that big-games were playing on the bar’s TV screens.
Lir has several different levels, all with their own bar-tending areas. The large center-island bar on the first floor is where most patrons tend to gather. Large TV’s that surround the floor’s perimeter are typically showing the "game-du-jour". The dark wood interior and cozy seating nooks make this a nice place to gather for a casual night out.
Lir typically does not have a line to get in, but occasionally it can become overcrowded after 10pm and the bouncers must make would-be patrons wait outside. The menu at Lir is not really anything extraordinary beyond pub-grub, but it is reasonably priced and tends to be delivered in a timely manner once-ordered. Drinks are averagely priced for the reason with cocktails being about $10 and drafts being about $4.
I don’t really understand what defines an "Irish" bar in Boston other than the nationality of the ownership group and the fact that they keep Guinness on tap. You won’t run into many "Irish" patrons from the old country here, just typical Bostonians with Irish routes somewhere in their ancestries. I find this fact to be the most disappointing thing about the "new-school" Irish bars in Boston; those that come to this town looking for the pub experience will have a hard time finding it with the proliferation of establishments such as Lir marketing to the whims of the tourist crowd. Lir is a completely respectable place and makes for an enjoyable casual night out, but the marketing of it as an Irish pub has struck a pet peeve of mine that can not be ignored.
From journal Another Boston Bar Crawl