The Pub

I am the kind of guy who goes somewhere, finds a place he likes, and keeps going back. A bit boring, I know. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration. But with me, there has always been the default option. This has been true for cafés, restaurants, pubs, and even the cities I travel to.

When it comes to pubs—or just places to have a beer—I’ve always had a preferred one: Casa del Gatto in Bonn, Café des Artistes in Toulouse, Jimmy’s and The Cove in Chicago, The Heidelberg, ABC, and Old Town in Ann Arbor (where I went out a lot), and The Jungle in Vancouver (although it doesn’t seem to exist anymore, this is the place where I had the most gin in my life). Here in Rennes, my go-to is O’Connells, and it’s by far the best of them all. The beer isn’t particularly exciting, but that doesn’t bother me—I’m the kind of guy who likes his usual pint to appear without having to ask. My taste in beer has evolved over time, but I prefer it straightforward. Funky Microbrewery experiments, super strong Belgian beers, or Québécois varieties aren’t for me. In Italy, I am a Peroni kind of guy. Or Spritz—but that’s another topic.

Going to the pub usually meant going in a group or making plans to meet there—sometimes with a lot of people, often just two or three of us. I occasionally went to Jimmy’s or The Jungle alone, but that was rare. And there were places like The Heidelberg where I’d only suggest going with a group—and arriving already drunk. Maybe, in hindsight, I’d suggest not going at all. On the other hand, it was there where I had some of the most memorable, weird conversations I’ve ever had.

In O’Connell’s, that’s “The Pub”, things are different. For one, the people working behind the counter are all uniformly nice and up for a bit of small talk. The place is open and bright, the kind of pub where you can just go, have a drink, and read a book, or grade, or whatever. It’s fairly large—not enormous, but definitely bigger than most of the others I’ve frequented. Yet it doesn’t feel anonymous at all. If I go on Fridays or Sundays, I know I’ll meet a bunch of people to stand by the counter and chat with for hours.

Another big difference: I always used to go to pubs with people like me, mostly people I knew from the university. The number of drinks I’ve had with mathematicians is endless. And that’s great, don’t get me wrong. But regularly talking to Louis, a gravedigger, to someone who works at the mint producing banknotes for Colombia or Venezuela, to a group of lawyers, to a guy who delivers books to elementary schools, to a florist—well, that never happened at ABC or Casa del Gatto. The florist loves castles and photography. The gravedigger was explaining the other day how hard Halloween week is for people working at the cementary. His daughter hand-makes shoes for Chanel.

One day, I arrived at The Pub and was told there was a present for me: the jar pictured here. A few days earlier, Kerry, a geophysicist from New Zealand whom I have been recently torturing with questions about how one dates the Earth, had left it for me there—a small jar of New Zealand Marmite. I think when I told him I use Marmite in cooking, very much like miso, he wished he’d been less generous with his sticky, gluey, tasty-in-soups black gold. Anyways, in return he got pimentón. I prefer not to think about how he might be using it. Anyways, Kerry also lent me Small things like these by Claire Keegan, one of the best books I have read in a long time.

The Pub is also really kid-friendly, which matters because I’m often there with the being. She clearly feels at home. On Sundays, there’s a group of people playing Irish/Celtic music—Kerry is one of the fiddlers. Some time I took her to listen, when she was about seven, she came back asking me for more juice. Following my usual parenting approach, I asked her why she was asking me and pointed to the counter—I have running-a-tab benefits athe The Pub, something pretty rare in France. Anyways, after a while she came back with her juice, left again, and returned with a pint—ordered on her own. “A pint for my daddy,” she’d apparently said in English. And they gave it to her.

I love my pub.