Soon after I moved to the United States in the autumn of 1995, I went to visit a friend in Boston. We went to a pub in Cambridge called—possibly—Grafton Street. It was an early example of the Irish Pub in a Box, sold as a unit and built to look like a slightly heightened version of the real thing back home. On the way I asked whether was like an Irish pub really, or just a poor imitation. “Well,” my friend said, “it’s not too loud, the tables are clean, and you can find the bathrooms. So not like an Irish pub at all.”

Via Alan Schussman, I see that a similar thing has arrived in Tucson, just down the road from my office. (Or, if it’s good, just up the road from my old office.) The website says the pub will “echo the pathos of rural Ireland to a tee,” which does not augur well. From the photographic evidence it seems like they went hell-for-leather on the relics, though. The old telephone box is a nice touch, as is—if it’s original—the postbox with the G-R emblem on it. Older postboxes were inherited from the British in 1922 and were merely repainted from red to green. But the royal seals were cast into the iron and couldn’t be removed. G-R and even V-R boxes are still around.

The two most important questions are (1) Will the pub’s staff be taught to pour stout properly? And (2) Will there be any actual Irish people around? “Probably not” is the answer to both questions, though the second is a little trickier than the first. It is of course much more enjoyable to be Irish in America than Irish in Ireland, which is why your typical expat finds the ideal number of Irish people in a pub setting to be about 1, i.e. himself. Perhaps some small number more may be tolerated if they are all known to each other and can be relied on to keep up the schtick. Any more than that threatens to stymie the flow of bollocks about the auld sod, or the charming adventures of the hapless emigrant, or the quality of the stout and how no-one pours it properly. It also reduces the beneficial effects of his accent in attracting sexually any relevant people in the immediate area. In my experience, Australians and especially Scots are essentially the same in this regard. With English people, the class composition of the group is an important intervening variable.