Maiden Lane’s multi-level Irish brewpub is a genuine architectural maze, and your group has already fragmented
The Porterhouse on Maiden Lane has over seven thousand reviews and a 4.4 rating, and roughly one in every twenty of those reviews contains, in some form, the following sentence: we lost each other.
This is not a failure of the reviewers. This is a structural property of the building.
The maze
The Porterhouse is arranged across a number of levels that resist confident counting. Reviewers report three floors. Others report four. Several report a mezzanine that they were unable to relocate on a second visit. There are staircases, half-staircases, galleries, snugs, and a bar that appears more than once – possibly the same bar, seen from different altitudes, though the Prat’s survey team was unable to confirm this before running out of daylight and lager.
The practical consequence is that a group of six entering the Porterhouse will, within eleven minutes, become three groups of two, on three different levels, each convinced the others have gone to the toilet. Phone signal is poor. The building absorbs shouting. By the second round, at least one member of your party has left and gone home and will explain nothing about it for several days.
The beer, which is the point
It is worth persevering, because the Porterhouse Brewing Company is a genuine Dublin brewery and this is a genuine brewpub, and in an area drowning in Guinness poured badly by people who do not care, the Porterhouse pours its own stout and pours it properly.
The Oyster Stout, the Plain, the Red – these are real beers made by people with opinions, and the range extends well beyond what any Covent Garden Irish-themed venue has any business offering. There is also a bewildering international bottle list, arranged by a system that has never been explained to the customer.
Ten to twenty pounds a head, which for the West End is a bargain, and which explains the seven thousand reviews.
Live music
There is a band. There is almost always a band. They are on one of the levels. You will hear them clearly from the level above and not at all from the level below, and the level they are actually on will be full, and you will not get in, and you will spend the evening listening to a very good band through a floor.
The Irish pub, and what has been done to it
Covent Garden is thick with Irish-themed venues, most of which were themed by a company in the Midlands that supplies the same seventeen enamel signs, the same fake shopfront, and the same photograph of a man with a donkey to every unit from Aberdeen to Plymouth.
The Porterhouse is not that. It is an actual Irish company, brewing actual beer, and the difference announces itself the moment the stout hits the glass. There is no plastic shamrock. There is no laminated sign explaining the concept of craic to you. There is a brewery, and it is theirs, and the beer is the argument.
The Institute for Authenticity Auditing in Hackney Wick has rated the Porterhouse at 91 per cent, deducting points only for the volume of the band and the fact that on a Saturday it contains four separate stag parties who could not name a single Irish county between them.
Maiden Lane
You are standing on a street where Voltaire lodged, where Turner was born, and which now contains a brewpub, a Rules, and a permanent queue for a doughnut. London does not do reverence. London does turnover.
Verdict
Excellent beer, genuinely Irish, chronically disorienting. Arrive together, agree a level, name the level out loud, and do not deviate from it under any circumstances. The Prat has seen what happens to groups that improvise. It is not pretty and it ends in a WhatsApp thread at 1am titled WHERE ARE YOU.
Official site: porterhouse.london
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]
