Editorial
The bars featured in novels earned their place on the page the same way great bars earn their place in a neighbourhood — by being specific, by having a particular atmosphere that cannot be replicated anywhere else, and by attracting the kind of people whose company makes for compelling material. These are the real rooms that produced real literature.
Ernest Hemingway turned Paris's bars into literature so effectively that it became impossible to separate the city's drinking culture from his prose. The bars he wrote about in A Moveable Feast still exist. Most of them still serve the same drinks. All of them carry the weight of what was written there.
James Joyce mapped Dublin's pub life with such precision in Ulysses that the book functions as a walking guide to the city's bars. Most of the pubs Joyce described still exist. Bloomsday on June 16th brings thousands of readers to trace Leopold Bloom's route, but these pubs are worth visiting on any other day of the year when the crowds have gone.
The English-speaking literary tradition ran through London and New York in parallel, and the bars that shaped it in both cities remain open and worth visiting. These are the rooms where the writing happened around, between, and occasionally during the drinking.
The bars that made it into literature did so because they were specific — specific in atmosphere, in clientele, in what they served and how they served it. La Closerie des Lilas in Paris and Mulligan's in Dublin are our top recommendations for those who want the full weight of literary history in a room that still functions as a working bar.
We also rate the White Horse Tavern in New York for anyone building a Greenwich Village afternoon around literary geography. Pair it with a walk to Chumley's on Bedford Street and you have covered the most important square mile in twentieth-century American literature.
Sofia has spent a decade mapping the literary bars of Europe — from Hemingway's Paris haunts to the Dublin pubs of Ulysses. She drinks Burgundy in the places Hemingway described and takes notes.