Amateur hour, part two

It was Mike Harrington's grandfather who opened Harrington's Bar and Grill in San Francisco's financial district back in 1935. Harrington's plenty proud of his Irish heritage.

Just don't try getting into his bar on St. Patrick's Day. With thousands of revelers crowding the streets outside, part of the city's long-standing tradition of Celtic pride, Harrington throws up police barricades and limits entry to the few patrons smart enough to have purchased tickets in advance. And that's an improvement on 1986 and '87, when Harrington shut his doors altogether — sending a message that fair-weather Irishmen should belly up somewhere else.

“It makes for a nice festive time, but also you're having the people who support you throughout the year, rather than the ones who showed up first or were the pushiest to get in,” Harrington says.

Harrington's neighbors have been quick to take up the slack, though, including the Royal Exchange, an English (English!) pub, and Schroeder's, a German restaurant.

“I think they're putting up their shamrocks right now,” Harrington says.

Leaving aside this nice little moment of E.U. ecumenism, don't forget that St. Patrick's Day means big money for bar owners across our fair nation. Nearly 20 million people will hit the town Thursday, with another 12.7 million at private parties, all totaling up to what the National Retail Federation projects to be $1.94 billion worth of corned beef and Bushmills.

Another amateur night
That puts the day not too far behind New Year's Eve, and while it's probably not fair to say St. Patrick's Day is our official bid for drunkendom, the day is about as close an excuse as you'll find to officially tie one on.

“There's a lot of amateurs, that's for sure,” says Patrick Coyne, owner of Seattle's Irish Emigrant and Paddy Coyne's.

No one likes to rain on a parade, even one in March, but barkeeps across the nation acknowledge that the day is nothing short of what Ciaran Staunton, owner of New York bar O'Neill's, “calls an organized madhouse ... like a scene from Monty Python.”

That means early, long and frenetic days for many bar staffs. At pubs like O'Neill's or The Burren, in the Boston suburb of Somerville, the fun begins at 9 a.m. with a traditional Irish breakfast, and extends to 1 a.m. or beyond.

Staunton starts even earlier, renting a truck to haul out his barstools at 7 a.m. Tables get pulled off the floor after lunch. For him, it's the culmination of a week of partying that includes meals for luminaries like New York Gov. George Pataki and plenty of Irish visitors who come to see the Big Apple toast their homeland.

And for everyone else? We don't have Carnivale, and we can't all make it to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, so this is what we've got left. “The people that come through the door,” Coyne says, “They want to be as Irish as they want to be.”

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