“Alright boys, get your asses inside there and start spending your cash,” says a confident bouncer to me and Anton as he holds the door open for us. “That pays my wages!”
With that slightly disconcerting start to our evening, we decide to scope the place out and order a couple of drinks. The interior of the bar is drastically changed from its shabby-boho days as Shebeen Chic, now given over to a fairly unremarkable and inoffensive dark wood-panels and all right-angles aesthetic, with not a crookedly-hung Le Chat Noir in sight.
“It kind of feels like a hotel lobby, doesn’t it?” says Anton. I reply by explaining that, unfortunately for me and though it does feel kind of like a hotel, I’ve used the comparison so many times, with reference to so many bars at this stage that I’m grown totally bored of it. I don’t feel like this is my fault at all, but rather that of the paucity of imagination of established and aspiring vintners, to consign themselves so readily to the banal and functional design dictated more by the affordability of the fit-out than considerations of the clientele experience or originality of any stripe.
“I’m not sure there’s anyone who’d read your reviews enough to notice you repeating yourself,” he responds, as we descend the staircase into the basement bar. “Anyway, it smells like a building site in here: you can still smell the freshly-cut wood. Maybe you can mention that.” I make a note of this, with “MDF?” next to it. It is not a thought I will later follow up on. But at this moment, with my nostrils dilated to accept the smell of cut wood, I notice the unmistakable scent of aromatic candles in the air. Looking around we see that every table on the lower floor has one at its centre. Personally I do not like this: the scent feels like it coats the inside of your mouth and detracts from the taste of whatever it is you’re drinking. In my case this is a pint of Guinness (€5), while Anton has plumped for a hot whiskey (€5) with no cloves, on account of there being none behind the bar.
When we move onto lager next, a Birra Moretti (€6) for me and a Kronenbourg (€5.80) for Anton, it’s clear that something isn’t right with either pint. Each tastes faintly of the same thing, that is, a sort of staleness or perhaps a cleaning chemical that overpowers both the weak beer and the aromatic candle at our table and causes us to plump for bottled beer (Sierra Nevada for €6.50) thereafter. It’s possible that the unpleasant aftertaste is a phenomenon of the lower-level bar on this night, as our initial order from the main bar was perfectly pleasant. Either way it’s not a particularly auspicious start: I easily could put it down to teething problems but at the same time there’s nothing here, even in an inchoate way, to make me want to come back to JT Pim’s any time soon, save perhaps not putting its happy-go-lucky bouncer out of pocket.
“I don’t like the Vintners Association,” Anton remarks in response to my “landfill Dublin drink dispensary” appraisal. “But by God do I respect them.” Stepping out into a still cold but thankfully not aromatic March night, I reflect that Anton’s respect might be all that JT Pim’s is getting, on this occasion.
JT Pim’s
4 South Great George’s St., Dublin 2
t: 01-6724645
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
Photos: Killian Broderick
