New British Pub for KC
As I’ve said before, one of things I miss most about Ireland is England. So the Ireland England rugby game yesterday morning addressed those absences nicely.
As the game has yet to be shown in Kansas City I won’t mention the result here. Some people are heading to The Gaf today to watch the game, and some people told me they are going tomorrow. Usually closed on Sundays the pub is opening up today especially to show the game - if you’re interested in Irish sporting history you’ll want to go.
Meanwhile I’m told the site of the former Chinese restaurant, the Double Dragon, on Main across from the Peanut, is to be a British Pub. I think it’s labelled a British-style pub so as to supplement the large English population in KC with any odd Scottish and Welsh people floating about. And disenfranchised Unionists, of course.
I believe that Blair Hurst, the restauranter who owns Baja 600 on the Plaza, is planning to open Firkin & Squire. Ah yes, a Firkin pub. Very big in Canada, the franchise chain is about to be very big all over the US. At the moment there are ten Firkin pubs in development in the Kansas City area, and nine over in the St Louis area.
Franchise start-up fees are reported to run between $300,000 and over $1,000,000, and what you end up with is a chirpy restaurant themed slightly on how a pub in Britain might look, and marketed as a neighbourhood family attraction.
Chrome, carpets, and charmless fruit machines then, or will the English flock (wallpaper) to it and make it truly a focal point for themselves? It seems a shame that when the English in KC want to do things like drink English beers and celebrate English New Year, they have to do it in places that pander to concepts of Irishness and tell them it’s actually Irish New Year, as if Greenwich was in Dublin.
Demolition has started on the Double Dragon.
More on Irish Pubs:
• The Closing of Irish Pubs in KC
• History of a pub, an Irish Pub
• KC Visitors Choose Irish Pub as Best KC Nightlife Spot - Huh?
• Where Do You Drink in Dublin?
More on British Stuff:
• See How Easy It Is To Like The British
• Cornish Nasty
• Irish Press Banned as Irish Independence Revoked
• Bloomsday Under Threat From British
• The Tartan Tiger: Like Ireland and Like Kansas
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
Hold on now a sec…normally closed on a Sunday? What the heck is the world coming to?!
I’m not sure how long it’s been available, but I recently discovered that Time-Warner cable now lets me watch the “Fox Soccer” network. The fare is about half British, a quarter Mexican and a quarter South American. This makes me very happy.
Kav, hopefully the world isn’t coming to this. I’m generalisng but pubs don’t fare so well in the land of the work ethic. North Wales is a very quiet place of a Sunday I recall. And Liverpool and Birmingham city centres of a Sunday evening. You’re in John Knox land aren’t ya? - is there life there of a Sunday?
Happy, yes the landscape of international sporting television has greatly improved with technology over the last decade. Alas before such inroads were made a small company in Ireland saw a chance to help the massive number that had newly emigrated in the 1980s, to London, New york etc. and made Irish sports available to them. I say alas because they hold the monopoly on broadcasting rights to Gaelic Games, and most Irish rugby and soccer internationals for the US market. So while most Irish sports fans follow soccer in England (and wherever else it exists), when it comes to the particularly Irish occasions, they tend not to see them because Setanta demands that pubs in KC pay as much for the rights as pubs in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. They seem unaware that there really are only a handful of people in the entire metro area that constitute the market and have priced it beyond them. We’re talking thousands of dollars.
We got to see a World Cup play off game in O’Dowd’s once because some Turkish people footed the bill knowing they had nearly 100 turks coming in from Lawrence. And we persuaded O’Dowds to pay the big fees once for an All Ireland Gaelic Football final, but with only twelve people turning up, the pub lost money - and that was at a special once-off I think of $500. Why Setanta can’t price it appropriately for the size of this market I don’t know. In the past people in KC have flown to Chicago and to Atlanta, just to go to a pub and watch TV - because there they have the numbers of Irish people to warrant paying the big fees to Setanta. It’s not for nothing they are known as SATANta.
I knew nothing about that insanity, Eolai.