The Royal Pub, Edinburgh
The pubs alone justify a trip to Scotland. The lack of pub culture, as I often have complained, is one of America’s worst flaws. Pubs are a social glue, and America is increasingly an unglued kind of place.
Edinburgh pubs can be very grand. Village pubs are small and cozy, almost always with a fireplace. Pub food will be fairly inexpensive and a touch rustic — soups, roasts, pies, and vegetables such as potatoes and broccoli, treated well.
Ken and I had a long afternoon in Edinburgh, looking at old publications and some first editions in the National Library of Scotland, which is an archive, really, since the items in the collections can be fetched and inspected, but not checked out.
After that it was a lecture at the Sir Walter Scott Club of Edinburgh, with wine and canapes after the lecture. It was a delightful group of people, most of them my age. My questions about cats in Scott’s novels stumped everyone I asked. I’ll have a post on Scott’s cats after I get home.
While waiting to catch a train at Waverley station back to East Linton, we had some ale at the Royal Pub. And I admit that, back in East Linton, we had one more slosh (Scotch, this time) by the fire at the pub in the East Linton Hotel.
The Crown pub, East Linton
French onion soup and a cheese scone, the Crown pub, East Linton
The closes we got to a Scottish or English pub was a place known as Hoffman’s Bar & Grill on Market Str. in San Francisco. It served the locals, shore men/women and the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph employees that worked on 3rd Str. I knew about this because my Uncle Tony who was a Western Union Supervisor would tell us about the local scene there and when I worked for the Telco then listening to the old-timers remanice. In 1970 I went to see if the scene was still there. It was, but a mixture of more business attired men than locals or hardhat workers. The ambiance then was similar to the pubs I remembered from England, Switzerland and Germany, heavily decorated with wood and bric-brac stuff bartenders and waiters moving quickly. Today it’s gone; drinking and domestic habits have changed, gentrification of the neighborhoods, and so forth. David points out America doesn’t have that ambiance, but in the east coast you can still find a few in New York, Boston and Orange, Conneticut slightly similar to what Scotland and other European pubs have today.