New Irish restaurant-pubs to try for St. Patrick's Day 

I'm at the bar talking to a guy named Ray, or maybe it’s Jay, and I will never see him again. I tell him about ThePub.ie, a website somebody launched in 2020, a few months into the pandemic.

"They called it a virtual Irish pub," I say, "and there were all these cartoon people on the home page living it up, and all these buttons you could click on if you wanted to chat with strangers, and other places to click if you wanted something more private."

"Nah, you need the real deal. It’s in the Bible," says Ray/Jay, shaking his head and directing me to a letter from the Apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians.

But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face.

Face. To. Face. Bombarded as we’ve all been by disembodied voices over the past two years, one might be forgiven for forgetting that there's something crucial about unmediated person-to-personage.

"You have to interact," Mike McNiff says. "It’s what humans do." He’s sitting across the table, in the flesh, on a Wednesday afternoon at The Irish Poet in Wantagh during a quiet moment, of which the pub has comparatively few these days. The Great Return started the third week in January, by his count. "People are out, people have had it. They’re fed up." And well-fed too, especially those who opt for his delicious Irish Dip sandwich, which ditches roast beef for the corned kind but leaves the cup of demi-glace intact. Or his spring rolls filled with pastrami and sauerkraut, or his shepherd’s pie …

McNiff, who grew up in west Ireland's Castlerea, opened the Irish Poet last year along with two buddies, both former colleagues of his at the Wantagh Inn. That anyone would pick the COVID era to open an Irish pub, an establishment that almost demands unrestrained social interaction in close quarters and smallish rooms, seems like madness. But if so, it is not a madness confined to Wantagh. Over the past year, no fewer than four Irish pubs opened on the Island, four new St. Patrick’s Day watering holes. Which is to say: even as the rest of us were locked in an eternal present, dreaming up ways to endure isolation, others were dreaming of a future when we’d isolate no more.

Now it’s Monday morning, and this time my exploits-in-person lead to a Bay Shore shopping center and a bar table opposite Steve Bermingham, who opened Kitty Mulligan’s there in March of last year. "It was slow to start but we’re getting traction, you feel things turning now," he says, the Dublin native’s blue eyes smiling just the way Irish eyes are supposed to. Bermingham slides open the barn doors he built to separate the bar area from his Trinity room, a cozy annex that’s equally comfortable playing host to speed-dating events, ’80s cover bands, televised rugby games, cutthroat dart tournaments, psychic nights, comedy nights, art nights and an awards dinner for the East Islip cheerleading squad.

"We’re building a nice community," Bermingham puts it. "People say, ‘what does that mean?’ It’s a place where everyone is…." He stops, shuffles over to the bar and returns with a framed black-and-white photo of his grandmother — Kitty herself. "Such a warm and inviting person. She had 32 grandkids but remembered every one of their birthdays in her head, and you always felt like she knew you. It’s a gift, I think, being able to know and welcome everyone."

It’s safe to say that Bermingham has inherited Kitty’s gift for making people comfortable, one he doubles down on with a year-round roster of Irish comfort foods — fine local cod battered with Smedick’s ale and fried to a powerful crunch, an Irish stew based on his mother’s recipe — and a special St. Patrick's Day menu, including a traditional Irish breakfast plate that finds room for black pudding, brown bread and lots more.

"There’s all this talk about the importance of having a third place," I say, this time to Tommy Lee, a patron at Rabbit’s Foot. "It’s this concept a sociologist came up with in the ’80s. We all have two places, home and work, although obviously that’s just one place for some of us these days. The pandemic, you know."

"Yeah, I get it," says Lee, who hopes to become a bar regular at the Hicksville pub-restaurant, biting into a cross between an egg roll and a Philly cheesesteak.

"A third place is a place you’re not obligated to visit. You’re there because you want to be. Everyone’s always glad to see you. You have these casual interactions with strangers."

"Like this one."

"It’s not fancy or snobby or pretentious. It’s cozy and friendly, like this place. All fun and good conversation."

Lee asks how the chicken is, politely willing the end of this particular good conversation. You tell him that your lemony breaded chicken cutlet draped over a scoop of mashed potatoes is the pub in alimentary form, pleasant and satisfying.

The Rabbit’s Foot, which opened last Sept., is owner Terence Scheurer’s first pub, but he’s long known their value as third places. As a lawyer in Manhattan, not only did Scheurer frequently find himself representing pubs, he frequently held client meetings in them, a casual, less formal setting than his office. Now he practices on the Island and has his own pub for meetings, but Hicksville residents have found it useful too, if for other reasons. "Getting out there and talking with other people and having a community feeling — it’s so important," he says. "It’s something that’s been sorely missed."

The third-place ethos: a casual setting, homey atmosphere in a place not home, friendly conversations among strangers, and one more thing: a spot where everyone is on equal footing, regardless of power, persuasion or pocketbook. It’s a concept enthusiastically embraced by Belfast in Lindenhurst, and depicted graphically by a painting right above the host stand.

"In this pub there is no tricolor," owner Dave Crowe tells you, speaking of the Irish national flag. "No, I had a young lady paint this, a provincial flag with all four provinces represented equally on a five-by-three." His point: "I don’t care if you’re Protestant or Catholic, from the north, south, east or west. You’re welcome in my business. It’s about inclusiveness, and we’re in a world of inclusiveness now."

Crowe is considered the Island’s Irish pub pooh-bah these days, having opened five Flanagan’s here since 1987 (Lily and otherwise), Crowe was born in an upstairs room above his father’s place in Limerick. (" My mother poured pints with me in her belly.") As such, he knows what pubs can mean, and what we stand to lose without them. "When I was young the pub was the center of the village," he says. "There were no bowling alleys, everything was done around the pubs. We are missing that now. I’m not trying to get everybody to come into my pub, but there’s no place to go anymore to teach people what’s going on in the community." There are young children who — because of COVID — have never seen a parade, he says, an injustice he hopes to rectify on March 26, when Lindenhurst hosts its first-ever St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Naming his bar for a city so associated with strife and division might seem an odd choice for a place dedicated to inclusiveness, but for Crowe, Belfast also means something else: strength and perseverance and surviving the present by reclaiming the past. He points to an old cash register in the corner, a relic he found himself drawn to during a trip to Galway five years ago. Despite being "in bits" with its keys broken, Crowe shipping it to a restoration guy in Pennsylvania. "When he got it, he says, ‘this is 110 years old,’" says Crowe. "It survived WWI, it survived WWII when they were confiscating bronze and brass for shelling, and it survived a bombing in Belfast."

The machine has been marvelously, gleamingly restored right down to its little round keys labeled farthing, shilling and ha’penny. "It went through so much and now look at it." Beautiful as it is, and impossibly shiny too, the register seems to beam a message into the dining room about there being life after hardship, or maybe that’s just the message you need to hear now. Were that register to talk, it might sound like Mike McNiff back at The Irish Poet.

"We need to get up," he says. "Let’s hope and pray we can, and let’s move forward, because in life you can’t go backward."

By Scott Vogel

scott.vogel@newsday.com@SvogelV

Newsday writer and restaurant critic Scott Vogel aims for a refreshing, gimlet-eyed take on the Long Island food scene, often while drinking a refreshing gimlet.