I WAS sitting at the counter of PJ Clarke’s, the famous Manhattan bar, on Sunday afternoon, when the drink of the man next to me caught my eye.
It was a pint of two halves: the bottom half some amber-coloured ale, the top half stout. And marvelling at how the two parts failed to mix, I suddenly realised that this was the infamous concoction known as the Black and Tan.
“Is that the infamous Black and Tan?” I asked the man. Who said yes, it was indeed a Black and Tan. But he didn’t understand why it was infamous.
So I told him about the Nike shoes controversy, and the Ben and Jerry ice cream. Then I filled him in about the War of Independence and the burning of Cork. But I didn’t go into too much detail, not wanting him feel bad about his choice of drink. As it was, he apologised for knowing nothing about that episode of Irish history. And I told him not to worry, that Nike knew nothing about it either.
In turn, I had to explain why the Black and Tan is largely unknown in Irish pubs. Which, political overtones aside, I attributed to a certain fundamentalism among Guinness drinkers, who are opposed for quasi-religious reasons to having their stout come in contact with other, unclean, beverages. To which the man countered bashfully that his favourite part of the pint was precisely the bit half way down – at the border crossing, as it were.
I was intrigued, though not so intrigued as to try it myself, even in the name of research. The truth (I swear) is that I was only in Clarke’s to drink in the atmosphere. It is, after all, a bar whose origins are – by American standards – lost in the mists of antiquity, whose customers down the decades have included Frank Sinatra, Jackie Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe.
Sinatra used to end his New York pub crawls in Clarke’s. By contrast, it was always a first stop for Richard Harris, who would go there from the airport. Buddy Holly proposed to his girlfriend on the premises.
And former customers also included mobster Frank Costello (the real Italian one, not to be confused with his fictional Boston-Irish namesake in
The Departed), the prototype for The Godfather’s Don Corleone.
In more recent times, Clarke’s had an association with another notorious New Yorker, Bernie Madoff, whose offices were nearby. The connection arose, indirectly, because the bar is a celebrated “holdout”: its then owners having refused to move when, in the late 1960s, a 47-storey skyscraper arose around them.
They did, however, do a deal with the developers in return for a 99-year lease. And when they ran into financial troubles some years ago, the landlords – by now valuing the bar as a landmark much more famous that their skyscraper (which is commonly known as “the big building behind Clarke’s”) – sold the lease to a consortium of owners who could and would continue the business. Prior to his conviction for embezzlement, Madoff had a share.
I’LL COME BACK TO MADOFF in a moment. But it just so happens that, also on Sunday, I found myself in another famous Third Avenue food and drink emporium (I visited museums too, readers – honest): Smith and Wollensky’s Steak-house.
This too is a New York institution and a classy joint. You knew it was classy because, on St Patrick’s weekend, the background music was the likes of Martin Hayes and Matt Molloy, rather than some of the god-awful balladeers you hear in other Manhattan pubs. But anyway, while having one of their steak sandwiches, I ordered a pint of “Irish Red Ale” to go with it. And only as I ordered did I notice that the menu had abbreviated the drink’s name in brackets, for no useful reason, to “I.R.A.”.
Now newspapers likes this one often include acronyms in brackets, after the first mention of an organisation’s title. This is to indicate that subsequent references will be by the abbreviation. But there’s clearly no need to do that on a menu. So the acronym here was presumably intended as a joke.
The question is, did locals understand the Irish context of “IRA”? Or, as with Black and Tan, was that too lost on them? The latter is entirely possible because, as I know from being a semi-regular completer of the New York Times crossword (personal record seven mins 45 seconds*), to most Americans, the IRA is an investment product. “Individual retirement account,” it stands for, and apparently it offers attractive tax efficiencies to the canny investor.
Bernie Madoff would have known all about IRAs. Indeed he was probably a major IRA operative, organising provisional and official IRAs, and possibly a Continuity IRA, and maybe one or two breakaway dissident IRAs, whose members he hid in safe houses under the floorboards. The only thing he didn’t operate, I’m guessing, was a Real IRA. But the wonder is he’s not serving his 150-year jail sentence as a political prisoner.
In any case, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that large US financial firms, nervous about Madoff-style frauds, had been offloading IRA products to smaller speciality dealers with more expertise in them. This has coincided, the WSJ reported, with “explosive” growth in IRA business. Yes, that was the adjective used.
Which bad joke brings me back to the pint in Smith and Wollensksy’s, and the question of whether its political undertones were understood locally. I still don’t know.
But at least the incident lent some insight into the scuffling I reported yesterday at the “Get your Irish Up” boxing event at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night. My guess now is that the participants, rather than having had too much beer beforehand, had just unwittingly mixed their IRAs with their Black and Tans. If that’s what happened, it may have been only the drink fighting.
* wind assisted