Irish Pub

Thursday might not be the best time to go to a bar to watch the Ravens. It's a home game, and it's Thanksgiving. You'll be hard-pressed to find many drink specials. In South Baltimore, the Irish pub Delia Foley's is offering the next best thing: cheap wings. The bar opened this year at the spot where Fort Charles Pub and Taps used to be. It is a prototypical pub, Lucky Charms-green and decorated with historical Irish flags. Though it carries all the usual beers, Delia Foley's has developed a reputation for its wings menu, which is as long as an Irish folk song.

Sometimes a bar has been around so long that it's easy to take for granted. So it is with Slainte Irish Pub . For eight years, the bar has been an anchor in Fells Point, a clean-cut destination for traditional Irish fare and sports. If you're a soccer fan, there's no better place in town to watch a match than at Slainte. When the site of the World Cup 2022 was announced, fans gathered at Slainte to commiserate over the United States' loss and to get excited about the championship.

Remember last year's guide to the top 50 bars in Baltimore ? The controversial decision to put The Laughing Pint at No. 1 ? All the angry owners and publicists and bar fans whose favorite watering holes weren't picked? And all the overjoyed people whose favorite bars ranked higher than they'd predicted? Well, it's coming back this Fall. This year we'll be picking the top 100 Baltimore bars. And! The guide won't be limited to Baltimore City proper. This year's guide will also be arranged differently: there will be ten readers' picks, ten critics' picks and eight categories each with ten ranked bars.

Here's the part where you can tell me how wrong (or how right!) I was on a review. This week's bar review is about Station North's long-in-the-works Liam Flynn's Ale House. The bar is almost as good as my favorite new bar of 2011, Red House Tavern . "Liam Flynn's Ale House has found a way to do the Irish pub right. This new bar from the former manager of the Pint-Size Pub is everything these other [Irish pubs] are not: original, personable, chill and, most notably, respectful of its city's long and rich nightlife history.

The sprawling complex at 2324 Boston St. has a spotty record. Canton Arts and Entertainment opened there in fall 2009 and fizzled out just several months later. It's not hard to see why — parking is difficult to find and it's tough to fill up such a large building. But Marc McFaul, who oversees Ropewalk Tavern, Stalking Horse and Delia Foley's, has decided to give it an overhaul by dividing the space into two bars with distinctive personalities. Open since June, the refurbished venue consists of a Southwestern barbecue bar and restaurant, Dark Horse Saloon, and Finnegan's Wake, an Irish pub. The two bars are decorated in accordance with their concepts; one was busy while I was there, and the other one wasn't; and they both offer exhaustive wings menus.

The bar at 1439 S. Charles St. has gone by different names over the past couple of years. Until 2008, it was the Fort Charles Pub. Then, it was Taps. When they started renovating it in November, its new owners were going to call it Catherine's Pub. But a month later, they switched permanently to Delia Foley's. What kind of bar is it? What else could it be but an Irish pub? As a concept bar, it works. From its name to its decor, it plays the Irish pub role so well it practically belongs in a Jim Sheridan movie.

One of my long-standing life questions is, What makes an Irish Pub an Irish Pub? Is it dark, moody shadows peopled by whispering conspirators nursing black pints amid the rhythmic phthwacking of darts hitting corkboard? Or is it any old joint that serves shepherd pie, taps Guinness, and cranks out a Van Morrison number every half hour or so? Probably Irish pubness is like art: a whole lot easier to recognize than define. 12:30 p.m. We enter James Joyce after a 25-minute walk.

A Parkton man had an idea that even the casual beer drinker would appreciate: What if you could draw your own frothy pint at the local pub? Turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that someone across the Atlantic already had the same idea. So when Josh Goodman discovered he had a kindred entrepreneurial spirit in Ireland, he teamed with the small company there to introduce Americans to the Draft Master this year. The mobile table fitted with beer taps is designed to let bar-goers draw their own brews and can be found in establishments in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Las Vegas.

It's not unusual for baseball or football games to draw tens of thousands of eager fans. But soccer? Tomorrow, some 70,000 soccer fans will flood M&T Bank Stadium for the AC Milan-Chelsea match. The sold-out game promises to be one of the year's biggest events at the stadium - a huge statement for a sport that is usually overshadowed by football, baseball, swimming - and even golf. That means some Baltimore bars are going to be swamped with pre- and post-game revelers.

Americans don't give themselves enough credit for corned beef and cabbage. Too often, corned beef and cabbage is thought of as an Irish dish. It's actually an Irish-American hybrid: Cooked cabbage may have old-world roots, but the corned beef is a distinctly American addition. So is the tradition of eating corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day, according to Margaret M. Johnson, author of The Irish Pub Cookbook. "It's definitely an Irish-American dish, derived from the very Irish bacon and cabbage," Johnson said.