The Fitz Bar,
Fitzpatrick Manhattan Hotel,
687 Lexington Avenue,
New York
fitzpatrickhotels.com
ON LEXINGTON Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, a tricolour flutters in the frigid Manhattan air. It’s not the only one around the streets of New York, mostly beckoning punters into bars with promises of Guinness, Jameson, a bit of fiddly-dee, the English Premier League and – almost to a man – shepherd’s pie with no lamb in it.
This one flies outside the Fitzpatrick Manhattan Hotel, along with the Stars and Stripes, as befits an Irish-American institution.
Opened in 1991, it quickly became a favoured choice for Irish visitors to the city and, as of 2015, attracted almost 30 per cent of its visitors – along with its sister hotel near Grand Central Station – from Ireland.
We aren’t among them but it's painfully cold, it's nearly dinner time, and the Fitz Bar looks like an awfully tempting spot right about now.
There’s lots of dark wood and bookshelves, with a dining room at the front looking out on to the street and the bar itself tucked away at the back, cosy in the extreme on a freezing (did I mention?) evening. We sit in the bar. Whatever the food's like, it's making a strong case to not be left. And now, the Guinness is here.
It's a good pint but, given I average about one every 18 months or so, I wouldn’t lean on that opinion too heavily. I’d be far more confident comparing Manhattans, and this one – how could you not? – is fantastic. Rich, deep, sweet, spicy, dangerous.
Also, maybe thankfully, not cheap at $15 – around £12 when we're there in January, probably about £250 if you go after Brexit. But that goes for everything, which is to be expected with Trump Tower and Tiffany a few blocks over and, if you walk out the front and cross the street, the Chrysler Building staring down at you.
But enough about the drink. There’ll be no stereotyping here. The food is the sort you’d find in just about any hotel bar in America, with a few nods to the old country. Sort of.
There’s ‘tricolor’ (as they spell it) nachos, with green guacamole, orange cheese and sour cream for a lasting peace between them, and a ‘traditional Irish chicken curry’, which appears to be based on a sweet chip-shop curry sauce, which is no bad thing.
And there’s a shepherd’s pie made with beef, although this one apparently comes from Yorkshire. Bacon and cabbage is perfectly good, with the meat nicely cooked, the cabbage still with a bit of welcome crunch and the baby spuds full of butter.
The chips that come with the toasted sandwich are the best thing on either plate, with the sandwich itself – turkey and stout cheddar – hot, crisp and gooey and doing its job more than well enough without any wow factor.
It all feels like food – albeit pretty good food – you eat to make sure the Guinness has something to land on.
By this time the bar is filling up – plenty of familiar accents – and the staff, who also have to see to the dining room as well as pulling pints, are getting a bit stretched. It takes a while for the requested dessert menus to arrive and, when they do, we split a decent cheesecake (Baileys, duh). But it's the item at the bottom of the menu that intrigues: “Three Irish cookies” for $3.
What could this be? Maybe something oatmealy? Aye, probably something oatmealy. Nope, what we get is what appears to be the last hurrah of a box of Family Circle, finally finished after Christmas.
But there are five of them, and at least the Irish coffees we get to go with them are well made and, perhaps by way of an apology for the wait, nearly as Irish as they are coffee.
And that’s what the Fitzpatrick is going for. Something more Irish than anything else, but with a bit of Midtown swish. The food might not match those aspirations, but the rest of the package makes it easy to imagine spending a evening in the bar, upping your Guinness frequency, with the odd Manhattan thrown in for good measure.
THE BILL
Toasted sandwich and chips $15
Bacon and cabbage $20
Cheesecake $8
Cookies $3
Guinness $9
Manhattan $15
Irish coffee x2 $24
Tax $4.63
Total $98.63
