My Guinness!

Our intrepid reporter searches out the food of Ireland in the neighborhood of the Celtics

by Stephen Heuser

Grand Canal
57 Canal Street (North Station), Boston; 523-1112
Open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily; Full bar; All major credit cards
Street-level access

Green Dragon Tavern
11 Marshall Street (Faneuil Hall), Boston 367-0055
Open 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily; Full bar; All major credit cards
Street-level access

The Irish Embassy
234 Friend Street (North Station), Boston; 742-6618
Open 11:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily; All major credit cards; Full bar
Up a step from street level

This is the story of a plan that failed, which, considering that the aim involved Irish food, may not be such a surprise. The idea I had was to survey Irish cooking in one area -- in this case, the Guinness-soaked neighborhood around North Station -- to find if not the best Irish cooking in Boston, then at least a representative sample. Several pints later, and several meals that chiefly involved sausage and some form of potato, I've decided that there are probably better places to survey Irish cooking (like, perhaps, any other neighborhood in Boston), but there's at least one fine meal to be had if you know where to look.

I started not with the oldest pub in the area, but with the newest: Grand Canal, an elaborately decorated place that opened at the southeast end of Canal Street this past winter. Its look is Dublin Victorian, which means framed prints, wine-colored wallpaper, tasseled lampshades, and the overall feeling of a bordello conceived by Disney.

The selection of draft beer is large and terrific, and the food -- well, the food was just large. I ordered almost everything Irish on the menu, which meant a shepherd's pie, a fish-and-chips plate, and bangers and mash. The fish ($8.95) was encased in a sort of batter shell with a still-doughy inside. The chips were thick American steak fries, instead of the requisite soft, square-cut chips that (as Kevin Kline put it in A Fish Called Wanda) are England's great contribution to world cuisine. The shepherd's pie ($7.95) fared a bit better, even if its pillowy mashed-potato cap overwhelmed the ground lamb and carrots beneath. As for the bangers and mash ($7.95) -- well, same mashed potatoes, a pool of Boston (not Irish) baked beans, and a handful of Irish link sausages, or bangers, arranged in a little fan across the potatoes. The bangers, to be fair, were what you expect when you order Irish sausages: tight skin; squishy and vaguely spiced-tasting insides.

At 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, no other Irish kitchens were open in the neighborhood, so I emigrated with my well-suited friend Kevin Boyle -- whose food preferences, it must be admitted, lie more with the Italian side of his family -- over to the Green Dragon, an ancient pub next to the Union Oyster House. (It turns out to be owned by John Somers, the owner of Grand Canal.)

Our waitress set us up with the obligatory Guinness and Murphy's, and we watched the TVs overhead as the Riverdance album won its Grammy, drawing cheers from the home crowd. We didn't stray too far from the original plan: fish and chips for Kevin, "Irish grill" for me ($8.95), which a quick inquiry revealed was identical to bangers and mash except it included bacon. But the baked beans were real Irish baked beans, and the bacon was splendid, a grilled version of that meaty, delicious Irish stuff that my colleague Jeffrey Gantz details. The fish and chips ($8.95) weren't any more Irish than the others I'd had, but at least the batter was cooked to a crisp and satisfactory golden crust. (Fish and chips across the Atlantic exhibit an almost inimitable greasiness and floppiness; you learn to love it or you move to America.) The chips here were the right shape, but still detectably American in texture.

Maybe I gave up too soon, before I'd tried bubble and squeak, or Guinness beef stew, or corned-beef anything, but I decided thenceforth to pursue the meal the Irish are reputed to do best: breakfast. I can't claim to have a history with Irish pub breakfasts, but I did live in London long enough to become well-acquainted with traditional English fry-up, which (apologies to the Republicans) is just a variation on the theme. The Irish version is eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, tomato, and "black and white," which is to say black pudding and white pudding (of which more later).

I had heard good things about the breakfast served at the Irish Embassy, a Friend Street bar whose diplomatic functions are strictly informal (there's a hostel upstairs). Breakfast is served only on weekends, so I hauled myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 10:30 on a Sunday morning and trundled downtown.

I guess you could say I was surprised, at that hour, to walk into a bar filled to capacity. Turned out this was a soccer crowd, and not even a very Irish one, gathered to watch a satellite telecast of a match between Aston Villa and Liverpool. After some trouble I located the single remaining seat, with a decent view of the match and a better view of a painting of Shane McGowan, who shows perhaps more clearly than any other public figure the results of too many years of the other sort of Irish breakfast, the kind I'd had the day before while watching rugby in a Central Square bar: a couple of pints of Guinness in a roomful of cigarette smoke.

In the end I was served very much the real thing, for $6.83 with tax and coffee. No beans, but the two eggs were fried firmly, the sausages were quite Irish, the bacon wonderful and thick, still edged with fat, and the chips -- well, these were chips, limp and flavorful and very, very Irish. I even enjoyed the puddings. (Black pudding is a slice of very firm dark sausage, flavored with mint and darkened with pig's blood, and white pud is a softer gray sausage, a bit livery-tasting.)

At the end of the meal, I wandered over to Grand Canal to try its version of the same breakfast, this time with a couple of friends. The difference in atmosphere hit me like a tasseled velvet brick: quiet Celtic music over the sound system, sunlight through the windows -- altogether a much calmer place to work through the last night's excesses (a job for which Irish breakfast food is uniquely well-suited). The breakfast here ($7.95) showed touches of upscale impulse, with a twisted orange slice, a sliver of honeydew melon, and home fries instead of chips, but it did nail some of the basics: the bacon, the sausage, the black and the white were every bit as good as what the Embassy had served. The rest of the Grand Canal brunch menu was conventional and American, but the music was straight from Galway and -- hey, it was afternoon now, so we could start in with the Guinness.