It is an unfortunate sign o' the times that bad bars are proliferating in Beijing - while the few good bars we used to have are disappearing, or degenerating into crapness. At this rate, the 'Hate List' will soon be the most populous strand on this blog.
Last night, The Chairman inveigled me into trying out the newly-opened Paddy O'Shea's.
How do I loathe it? Let me count the ways. Or...... you could just refer back to my 'What makes a great bar' post, and note that it fails on every single count.
It's off to a bad start with the name. That just screams faux Irish, doesn't it? And, as The Cowboy and I have agreed before, faux Irish joints are amongst the naffest and most irritating of all 'theme' bars. The 'Paddy' is the first glaring giveaway: a proper Irish bar would just be called 'O'Shea's'. Now, the manager (owner?) of this frightful bar is actually an Irishman - but he's not called O'Shea, or Patrick. Bad start.
Bad location - in the business district, but not particularly near anything else you'd want to go to of an evening. Facing on to a busy main road, in what was intended to be a retail space - floor-to-ceiling window right along the front. Horribly overlit, tacky decor, dozy staff, atrocious pool table (despite being brand new), unappetizing-looking food, skanky beer, sky-high prices (which are not on display anywhere)...... and a 'happy hour' that finishes at 7pm.
Ah yes, and a boss who, despite being present throughout, managed to avoid talking to a single customer in the two-and-a-half hours I was there - even when, through some strange cock-up in the serving arrangements, he was briefly the only person behind the bar.
This place is BAD in so many ways. It offends me in a most profound way. Such places ought never to come into existence. They certainly ought never to survive. And yet - amongst certain segments of Beijing's undiscriminating, homesick, overly affluent expat population - it will probably find its niche.
Then again, it is so stupendously dreadful that perhaps it does stand a chance of failure after all. Place your bets. I think I give it 6 months.
5 comments:
I hate it. I do not need to know more than you have said, and I would have hated it on an awful lot less.
I don't think Paddy O'Shea's is quite as bad ad Finn MacCool's, which is what the poor old Norwood Hotel has become.
Perhaps the worst renaming I've ever seen was when I lived in Battersea and the Queen Victoria became the Spikey Hedgehog. I kid you not.
Was the Vic your local? The name rings a bell. Didn't you take me in there once or twice?
At least Finn MacCool's is drawing on Irish folklore and isn't just trying to passing itself off as a traditionally-named pub that's actually owned by someone of that name. As a long-time Plastic Paddy and devout lover of Irish bars, peat fires, wet dogs, and slow-poured Guinness, I find something excruciatingly offensive about the Paddy O'Shea's concept.
Thanks for the Christmas card! Lots of love to Julia and the mini-harves.
I think the reviewers here are trying too hard. I come into Beijing a few times a year and think Paddy O'Sheas is pretty good. My assessment is based on the quality of the drinks, the owners friendliness, the sport shown on tv, the overall vibe and the pool (the pockets are tight and less forgiving but that does not make it bad, just an extra test of your ability).
Perhaps the guys giving this a bad review are just bad at pool?
No diligent team of reviewers here, Dafty - it's all my own work. And thus The Barstool makes no claim to journalistic standards of thoroughness or fairness. If a place offends against my personal canons of taste, I will let rip.
Paddy's is - as I tentatively predicted - proving remarkably popular with a certain sort of crowd. As far as I can gather, they mostly fall into three types: elderly expats left 'homeless' by the closure of the old Goose & Duck (and not taking much to its new incarnation); people visiting from Shanghai; IELTS examiners, who work just up the road at the British Council offices in Landmark Towers. None of these three groups are my sort of crowd. And I think it's particularly telling, particularly damning that people from SH invariably commend the place (it is exactly the sort of soulless and overpriced bar that abounds down there, but which we are lucky enough to have been largely free of here in BJ).
I only ever went there a handful of times, in the first month or so of its being open. Perhaps it has improved. Perhaps the prices have been lowered a bit. Perhaps the happy hour has been extended into the evening, when people might actually be able to take advantage of it (rather than into the afternoon, when they can't). Perhaps they actually have a price list now, rather than leaving you to guess how much the drinks are. Perhaps the staff are now trained up. Perhaps they've stopped wearing those stupid bloody waistcoats. Perhaps. But on most of these points, I rather doubt it.
I like an 'English' cut of the pockets on a pool table, and agree that it makes it a much more satisfying game than the American style of table. The table in Paddy's - when it first opened - had been poorly set up: the bed was not flat, and the cushions were ridiculously over-bouncy. I am a pretty decent player, and so am particularly demanding of the tables I choose to play on. I managed to win most of the games I played in Paddy's, but it was a CRAP table. I gather they've moved it upstairs now, and it might perhaps be a brand new one. Maybe it's playing much better these days. This alone would not be enough to entice me back.
The main complaint here, though, was about the conception of the bar: cod Irish is an abomination. I speak here as someone of Irish ancestry, and someone who has enjoyed many of his finest drinking experiences in Irish bars (both in Ireland, and in other countries around the world). Genuine Irish is a delight; commercial "Irish" gets my back up.
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