Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street, Dublin

Mulligan's at 8 Poolbeg Street has been open since 1782, making it one of the oldest continuously operating pubs in Dublin — a low-ceilinged, dark-panelled room a short walk from Trinity College and the River Liffey that has served as a gathering point for journalists, writers, and musicians across three centuries of Irish cultural life. John F. Kennedy drank here when he was a correspondent in Europe in the 1940s. James Joyce referenced it. Brendan Behan was a regular, which is how it found its way into the imaginative world of Shane MacGowan, who wrote "Streams of Whiskey" as an explicit ode to Behan's spirit and the particular vision of freedom that the Dublin pub tradition represents.

MacGowan's relationship with Dublin pubs was not incidental or affectedly bohemian — it was central to his understanding of what Irish culture was and what it could produce. The pub as a site of conversation, song, argument, and poetry; as a place where class dissolved temporarily and talent could be demonstrated regardless of origin; as an alternative to the respectability that both England and the Catholic Church had offered and that he consistently declined. Mulligan's embodies that tradition in its oldest and most intact form: the mahogany, the Guinness, the quality of the silence between sentences.

Mulligan's is still open at 8 Poolbeg Street, operating on the same principles it always has. It does not have a kitchen. It does not have a DJ. It has not been renovated in any fashion that its Victorian customers would find bewildering. It is, by general consensus, one of the finest pints of Guinness in Dublin, which in context is a form of serious critical praise.