Beer at James Joyce Irish pub cheaper now than in ’93, says owner Frank Haughton
Earlier this month there was a big party at Prague’s James Joyce marking the 20th anniversary of its foundation. The country’s first genuine Irish pub, the Joyce was opened by former banker Frank Haughton. Indeed the Irishman opened it twice: after the original location near Charles Bridge closed, he launched the pub again in 2009 a short walk from Old Town Square.
“My plans were rather different, because I had got out of the broking business and I intended to go to Germany, where the Irish pub business was expanding quite substantially, back in the 1990s…”
Actually I read that there was a whole warehouse of old Irish furniture and stuff in Germany and a new Irish pub was opening every week in those days.
“Yeah. People talk about Irish pubs worldwide, but really the European expansion of Irish pubs originates in Germany. That’s where the real big boom came.
“I think at one stage in Germany there were maybe 1,000 Irish pubs. Now there are about 600.
“At first I was going to go to Germany. I had a site located, near to Salzburg actually, just on the border between Germany and France.
“But the deal on that fell through on a Monday morning. Then I was talking to a friend of mine back in Ireland and he said, I’m opening a radio station in Prague – why don’t you come out and help me? Maybe you’d open your pub there; you help me, and I’ll help you.
“So I came out for this and a bit of help with the opening of the radio station, which was one year earlier than the pub.
“I came here and thought, my God, I’ve got the German audience here, because there were so many German tourists here at the time, and I don’t have to live in Germany – that’s a bit of a bonus [laughs]. That’s how I ended up coming to Prague rather than going to Germany.”
How was it starting a business here in those days? I guess those were the days of the famed Wild East?
“I eventually found a space and the guy told me it had permission to be a pub. We opened on November 5 and if you calculate five weeks back, it was some date in September 1993.
“I went home to Ireland and bought part of the interiors of an old church in Belfast that had been burnt down by the IRA. Some guy in Dundalk had a lot of the floorboards, the pews and the organ gallery, etc., etc. So I bought a lot of that stuff.
“I brought over an architect, measured the space, went back, got the stuff to match the space and sent out seven Irish builders of various skills.
“We opened five weeks later. And I didn’t really understand when the authorities started knocking on my door and saying, where’s your license? As far as I was concerned the guy had told me the space had permission to be a pub, and I opened a pub [laughs].”
So you had to grapple with the bureaucracy for a while?
“Yes, I’d a different kind of grapple with bureaucracy – I did things first and paid the price later.
“It was actually quiet scary. Because then I didn’t really know people who could reliable translate for me. People had much less knowledge of English than they have now.
“It was quite scary to try and deal with these people, because you didn’t really know… And they were much more cold than they are now. I mean, people have warmed up and relaxed quite a lot since then.
“Every time they came you just kind of felt, God, I’m dead [laughs] – my investments gone and I’m out of business, what am I going to do?
“But after some time, when you rationalise the situation… there was nothing wrong in what the people were looking for.
“It’s just that I hadn’t gone through the process. And I thought, somebody here is going to really bury me.”
Who were your customers then? A mate of mine who used to work in the James Joyce in those days was saying, for instance, that Karel Gott, the famous Czech singer, went there because nobody would recognise him.
“First of all, there was a big demand for a place where people could go and speak English, and order food that they recognised, order drinks that they recognised.
“I had the same feeling when I came here. I would leave the pub sometimes to go somewhere else and there were so many places where they just didn’t invite you go to in.
“You didn’t feel like you wanted to go in. They were dark and dingy looking. You knew you wouldn’t be able to read the menu and nobody would talk to you.
“So this was a real breath of fresh air for these guys. First of all, all the foreigners came.
“Then the Czech people came, for two reasons. They came definitely, one phase of them, because they wanted to try Guinness.
“They’d heard about Guinness and Guinness to them was, I think, kind of another mark that they’d emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.
“They were now freely able to drink a drink that was available worldwide, which they knew was famous, they had fantastic beer, and they all wanted to try it.
“Also, even though by Czech standards we were expensive, they also had the curiosity to try the whiskeys. They had the same interest in trying whiskeys they had never tried before.
“They wanted to go somewhere where nobody would overhear their conversation, and there were various corners they could hide in in the old James Joyce.”
You’ve been celebrating 20 years of the James Joyce, but you mentioned the old James Joyce. There was a period in between when there was no Joyce, I believe, and the current James Joyce is the former Molly Malone’s…
“Yes. The space we had in Liliová [St.] will always be special – the birthplace of your current business will always have a special place in your heart.
“But we had originally got a lease for 10 years. We stayed there for 12 years. The landlord wanted the space back; I think wrongly really, because since then the space has never really been well utilised.
“He’s tried to do various things, and the building is certainly the poorer, I think, for not having James Joyce there.
“Of course I was getting older as well and I was thinking, OK, I have a pub on the Old Town Square [Caffrey’s] and it provides me with a reasonable living and I don’t really need to do anything else.
“But then when this space here, which is the former Molly Malone’s, became available, I just felt the space was too nice… I mean this pub to me is one of the most real Irish pubs anywhere, and I mean even in Ireland.
“If I was originally to have chosen between Liliová and here, I would have chosen this space.”
Also hear you have the great windows…
“Yes, the rooms are nicer, there’s more character here than there was… we had character in Liliová because we had people. They congregated together, they all spoke together, they mixed together, it was like family – they all knew each other.
“But the space wasn’t as attractive as this space here. Even though I looked at it… and by this point, instead of being the early dreamer that I was I’d become more of a realist.
“I thought, I’m never going to make much money out here, but I can’t resist doing it. And we decided to have the rebirth of the James Joyce in December 2009.”
“Our prices are beginning to merge now with typical Czech prices. Of course, foreigners don’t see that it way.
“When we started in the James Joyce in Liliová in 1993, you had an exchange rate of 60 and over [crowns] to the pound sterling. Now, until recently you had an exchange rate of 29 and now we have 32.
“So that has effectively doubled the price of everything for the tourist coming here. When a tourist now converts the price of our Guinness into his own money he comes up with pretty much the same price he came up with 20 years ago.
“So our prices are the same, or slightly lower. I’ve always been trying to remember this, but when we opened in Liliová I think we charged 50 for a beer. Now we charge 48.
“I would suspect then a unit, half a litre of beer buying from the brewery, was probably costing 5 crowns. Now a half litre of beer costs between 20 and 25 crowns. So margins have tightened, a lot, and prices haven’t gone up.”
Who are your clientele today, on the whole?
“We tried to work this out, not very scientifically, but I would say here now between 70 and 80 percent of our clients in the new James Joyce are Czech.
“Most evenings we’re pretty full, and nearly all the customers are Czech. We get mixed people coming at lunchtime. We’re not so busy at lunchtime – we have a great lunch, but we’re tucked away in a little corner, we’re not so visible.
“We get 20, 25 people for lunch, something like this. They’ll be mixed, but in the evening the vast majority of the people here are Czech.”
You mentioned earlier the boom of Irish pubs in Germany in the early 1990s. Generally speaking, what is the secret of the success of Irish pubs internationally? Why are they so popular?
“People always mention to me … the first thing they go: Irish music, Irish black beer, blah, blah, blah. I disagree with this totally as the first point.
“Obviously, when you open a pub you must have good beer. But after this, to me, the next thing is people. This to me is the core and the foundation of an Irish pub.
“If you don’t have people who communicate with the customers, who help the customers to relax and who almost act like an intermediary between customers, getting people to mix, be more helpful than in other pubs…
“I mean an Irish pub is in many ways an information centre. The Irish, I think – unlike Czechs, unlike German people, other continentals – are not so private.
“We’re nosy buggers. We like to know what everybody does and what’s happening around the place [laughs]. So when people want some information, they come to an Irish pub, very often.
“I’ve gone away with guys to Madrid and other places and we go away saying, we’re not going to the Irish pub! And we end up going to the Irish pub, to find out where we should go: good restaurants, nightclubs, what we should do, what we should see, what’s going on in town.
“You end up going to the Irish pub because you know the people there will talk to you… So the primary thing about an Irish pub: décor’s important, the cosy pub’s important, but the people are key.”
Earlier this month you had a party celebrating 20 years of the James Joyce. Were there many face there who were also there 20 years ago?
“Yes. We had a reasonable cross-section. We had quite a few people we hadn’t seen – expats living here.
“But the big surprise to me was that some Czech people who used to go to the old James Joyce found the place out and came here for the evening. Some of the actually brought me gifts and said the place had played a special part.
“I think on the evening we probably put through about 150, 200 people, and about 50 of them were people we hadn’t seen for a few years.
“You’ll see if you look around the pub that we have a couple of hundred photographs from 20 years ago. And that’s a bit scary actually, when you look back and see how many people including myself looked then and look now [laughs].
“We didn’t even have a programme as such on the evening, because that evening was to be all about people touching base again, remembering the old days and looking back, and how kind Prague had been to many of them, expats.
“You had people who had formed alliances, whether they were business or romantic. You had people who started businesses and failed, people who had made huge successes.
“And a lot of those people met and made their early contacts in the James Joyce. It played a part for them then and it was nice for them to be able to remember once again what happened all those years ago.”
