The Bar
Visited 8/2/2024 @ 8:30pm.
The Drink
Irish coffee. Teeling Small Batch Irish whiskey, coffee, demerara, whipped cream, nutmeg. $16.
The Dead Rabbit was one of those venues where the bartender was not amused by my standard request to give me the drink that they felt best represented the bar. I never hold it against them, as a Friday night on Sixth Street is usually neither the time nor the place to force a bartender to plumb the depths of their soul to isolate the essence of the establishment, but in my defense, they had a lot of cocktails, including not one, not two, not even three, but four distinct Irish coffees. I have to commend the bartender for not simply giving us two shots of Rumple Minze the way that her counterparts at Friends and Barcelona did in the same Friday night scenario, because she gave me their standard Irish coffee and it was delicious. She couldn't tell me much about the coffee, but Teeling is a newish Irish distillery, and this was one of their
entry-level whiskeys, which are often underrated compared to their fancier siblings. Not that it's generally possible to make a bad Irish coffee. You read a lot about the important role that
hotel bars have had in the history of the cocktail, but the Irish coffee was invented in
an airport bar in Foynes Airport, near what is now Shannon Airport, which is possibly unique in cocktail history. I have had an Irish coffee at the Buena Vista in San Francisco, which
popularized the drink in the US (apparently the story that inventor Joe Sheridan brought the recipe with him
is untrue), and this one was right up there. Elijah got the frozen Irish coffee, and while it was not quite up there with the version from the
Erin Rose in New Orleans, which is one of my favorite drinks of all time, it was excellent too. They theoretically have some Austin-specific special cocktails, but those will have to wait until next time.
The Crew
Notes
The fourth stop of the evening, and certainly the most upscale. The Dead Rabbit
replaced BD Riley's, an Austin-native bar which was one of many tragic COVID casualties, though luckily they still have a location up in Mueller. I always find it amusing when one bar is replaced by a very similar bar - what, is it in the lease that you have to follow the same theme and keep the same
goofy shit on the wall? - but it makes a bit more sense when you consider what a globally successful business "Irishness" is. Earlier this year I had the privilege of spending St. Patrick's Day at Paddy's in Cuzco, Peru, the self-proclaimed "
highest 100% Irish owned pub on the planet", which was possibly even more Irish than the Irish bars I've been to in Ireland. The reason why there are a zillion Irish bars all around the globe and not the equivalent number of, say, Welsh or Scottish bars, is in large part due to the
Irish Pub Company, which has done a very good job of meeting consumer demand for cozy, intimate, friendly, joyous, convivial spaces for
pints of plain and
good craic by airlifting prefab bars to every corner of the planet.
Interestingly, the OG Dead Rabbit in Manhattan (named after a
questionably historical gang that was further embellished in the movie Gangs of New York) was founded as
a bit of a reaction to this particular version of Irishness, as owners Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon came from Belfast, where they ran "the world's best cocktail bar" at the Merchant Hotel, although touches like the sawdust on the floor allude to the stereotype that Irish pubs involve
spilling a lot of blood and beer. Less true to the stereotype are the high prices ($25 for fish & chips?), but this is where you would start to rhapsodize over how the slow transformation of the humble Irish tavern into an extravagant gastropub mirrors the metamorphosis of Austin from a working-class college town to a high-priced metropolis, the upscalification of the bar a metaphor for the gentrification of the city, and on that note, in search of a more affordable pint to ponder over, we made our way to the next bar.
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