A síbín was an unlicensed drinking den, usually run by a woman, usually to survive. It is now a cocktail bar with a 4.4.
A síbín – anglicised as shebeen – was an unlicensed drinking house. Illegal. Unlicensed by definition, because licensing was a tax, and a tax is what you cannot pay.
They were, overwhelmingly, run by women. A widow with a room and a still, selling poitín to men who had nowhere else and no money, at hours no legal premises would keep, under constant threat of the law.
There is now a cocktail bar in Covent Garden called Síbín Speakeasy. It has a 4.4 from sixty-one people. There is a velvet rope.
The distance travelled
Consider the two words in the name, because they are the same word twice.
A speakeasy was an illegal American bar during Prohibition. A síbín was an illegal Irish bar during roughly everything else. Both terms describe premises operating outside the law because the people using them could not access the legal version – in America because of a constitutional amendment, in Ireland because of poverty and the excise.
Both words now mean: dark, exclusive, expensive, and slightly hard to find on purpose.
The Prat’s etymology desk notes that we have taken two separate words for a bar poor people used because they were locked out of the legal one, put them side by side on a sign, and used them to sell a fourteen-pound cocktail behind a rope.
The manufactured hiddenness
We wrote about this at the Bootlegger and it bears saying again, harder.
The original speakeasies and síbíns were hidden because discovery meant arrest, confiscation, and ruin. The hiddenness was not an amenity. It was a defence.
The modern version is hidden because hiddenness converts extremely well – it produces a feeling of privilege in the customer that can be priced, and it filters the room by persistence, and it photographs well.
The Institute for Simulated Risk in Woolwich has calculated that London now contains more bars pretending to be illegal than there were actual illegal bars in London at the height of the Gin Craze, which is a sentence that ought to give somebody pause.
The bar itself, which is good
Sixty-one reviews and a 4.4, which is a small but real sample. Irish whiskey, taken seriously. Poitín, which is worth ordering once so you understand what people were actually drinking in the original article. Staff who know the list.
It is a well-made bar with a difficult name and it is not the bar’s fault that the word means what it means.
Poitin, and why it was illegal
Distilled at home, usually from barley or potatoes, usually at night, usually in a place a revenue man would not walk to. Banned in Ireland for over three hundred years, from 1661 until 1997, and made continuously throughout that period by people who had no intention of stopping.
It was not banned because it was dangerous. It was banned because it was untaxed. That is the whole of it, and it is worth knowing before you order one at fourteen pounds in a bar with a velvet rope in Covent Garden.
Verdict
Good drinks, real whiskey knowledge, uncomfortable etymology. Go, order the poitin, and raise it to the widows who sold it illegally out of their kitchens to keep their children fed, and who did not have a rope, and did not need one.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
