A week later just before the five o’clock hour my roommate and I walked in to an empty Banshee Pub on 1373 1st Avenue and were promptly greeted by a jovial Gavin Ward. Unusual for a Scotsman to split time between two Irish pubs? Not so, according to Ward. Scottish and Irish culture are closely linked. The legends and folk history of the two places are woven together. “The Scotch and Irish get on quite well together,” he said. “Some people even apologize when they’ve confused my accent for an Irishman’s,” he continued. His smile at the end of the sentence allayed the tension I feared my questions might cause.

The mystique of accents and foreign custom is lost to many on the Upper East Side because of its concentration of Irish pubs. Ward admitted that his accent can be a draw for the fairer sex, but maintained that it’s old hat for anyone who’s spent much time out on the town.

The difference in custom is quite apparent to bartenders from the United Kingdom working in New York. “The way people drink is the number one difference,” says Ward. In the U.S. people most commonly sit at the bar and talk to the bartender. Bar seats are at a premium. In the U.K. the opposite is true. Patrons collect their drinks at the bar and retreat to tables with their friends. Only when all of the tables are taken do reluctant latecomers claim stations by the bar itself. What those patrons drink is different as well. I spoke up when the topic turned to beverages of choice, hoping to prove myself marginally knowledgeable about a land I had never even visited.

“Let me guess – just pints,” I said.

“Well, mostly guys will drink pints – some bottles and maybe a whiskey. Girls are the only ones who drink cocktails, though. Usually something simple too. A guy would never order a mixed drink,” Ward insisted. On this point he was especially firm.

After learning that I had been ordering what in the estimation of a Scottish bartender were “girls’ drinks” I was primed for more lessons. I asked why most pubs on the Upper East Side served no food. This, it seemed, was a distinction that the New York pub shared with its overseas counterpart. The best answer I could extract from Gavin was the simplest one imaginable. People, apparently come to pubs to drink, not to eat. Instead of apologizing for my ethnocentric stupidity I asked a follow-up question. Why was it that places serving drinks and no food had no bouncers to take care of the trouble that would surely grow out of an exclusively alcoholic menu? Gavin intimated that a good bartender controls more than filling glasses – he controls the pub. His direct explanation was painfully simple. “In New York people are pretty well behaved. When you ask them to leave they usually do,” said Ward matter-of-factly. He claimed he had only had to physically put people out three or four times. I had to come to an outpost of Ireland run by a Scottish bartender to learn that as an American I had been drinking like a girl and was living in the antithesis of the harsh New York I thought was my home.

Gavin said he had learned lessons he thought he had already known as well. He had worked behind a bar for ten years in Glasgow, Scotland. When he began tending bar in New York, he said he felt as if it were his first time ever pouring drinks. The speed demanded and eclectic orders placed had knocked the pro for a loop. After more than two years in New York Ward presides over something not quite Irish or Scottish or even American. New York City pubs are entities all their own, but the next time you happen by for a drink you might order a round at the bar and carry some pints over to your friends at a table in the back. The simple act just might make your bartender feel at home. And leave the fancy cocktails for someone else.