You know those fake Irish pubs that exist in places outside Ireland? They have Irish names and menus which talk about the craic, and signs over the door saying Failte, but the staff are Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders or Eastern Europeans just like every other pub in London. And they simply serve Guinness along with the same Budweiser or Stella Artois that other pubs have. Apart from the odd independent, there's a whole chain of them in the UK called O'Neills, and they are about as Irish as my arse⁺.

Fake British or English pubs are less common, but I've seen a few around the place. There is one in Colorado Springs which listed its menu in the phonebook, and I nearly died laughing at it. Can't remember any of the details now, I was there for alt.polycon 11 in... 2003? But it included such British staples as black bean soup with nachos, along with attempts at actual British food that went a bit wrong and ended up like the "beef trifle" on Friends (Video).

What I really wasn't expecting to find was a fake British pub... in central London. It's called London Pub! No, really. It's just round the corner from College, on Woburn Place. Fear.

⁺ My arse is actually more Irish than you'd think, given that my mother's maiden name was - well, something I'm not going to tell you here, due to the vast quantity of online bankers and retailers that use mother's maiden name as a security question - but certainly a surname that would turn up in any top 20 of Irish surnames. Though the shape of my arse comes entirely from my Asian grandmother. Still, its genes are some percentage Irish. About the same percentage as those pubs, I reckon.

Tags: london
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