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"You can tell a good pub by the way it fits around your shoulders," Britons say. To re-create the same cozy atmosphere, many pubs are turning themselves into miniature recreation centers. Flanking the open fireplace in St. Louis' Fox & Hounds are high-backed niche seats for chess players. Los Angeles' Ye Mucky Duck, opened five years ago by Briton Brian Cameron, settles for the ubiquitous dart board; but Cameron's latest pub, The Saucy Swan in Costa Mesa, offers customers a further choice of pitching horseshoes or bowling on its private half-acre green.
Poems & Horror Flicks. Some pubs have found it pays to go highbrow. In Chicago's John Barleycorn Memorial Pub, owned by Sculptor Eric Van Gelder, classical music is piped in continuously, and there are regular slide shows from the pub's 1,800-slide great-paintings collection. Manhattan's White Horse Inn puts out a twelve-page pub letter called "The Horse's Mouth," filled with its patrons' poems, short stories, one-act plays and random ramblings. Habitues of New York's Spark's Pub get together Sunday afternoons to view old horror flicks.
The essential thing seems to be to hit off the right atmosphere. "There were always nice places to go drinking when we were in college," nostalgically recalls Al Sewell, who opened Atlanta's Lion's Head a year ago with Georgia Tech Classmate Jerry Dilts, and can now count on 100 regulars a week. "What we wanted was a sort of college hangout for adults. We found that a pub is about the only thing like that."