First, the holiday food specials: Guinness beef stew, shepherd's pie and reubens.
When I got there, I found two musician friends slated to perform already at the bar eating.
But being vegetarians, they weren't going to be much help in choosing which meaty special to have.
What they were was nice enough to join me at a table where I decided on beef stew.
The bowl of stellar stew had nice, big chunks of meat, plenty of carrots and potatoes and a hearty gravy full of pepper.
It should have been enough but I followed that with a reuben if only because I was told the corned beef was house-cured.
I don't know if the kitchen staff had any Irish in them, but this was some beautiful corned beef, sauerkraut and Swiss on perfectly grilled rye.
About the time I finished the first half of it, another musician friend came in and I invited him to join us.
I made the introductions and he complimented my sandwich.
Feeling
He reminded me that he's become pretty much a vegetarian...at least until this afternoon.
Seems he'd stopped by a friend's house and had ended up eating pig.
And a lot of it.
As if that wasn't surprising enough, he was eager to eat my beef, too, so I cut him a piece of the sandwich. And another.
I felt like I was contributing to the delinquency of a vegetarian.
Saying he once considered himself a connoisseur of reubens, he proclaimed mine possibly the best he'd ever had.
Aren't you glad you came now, I asked.
"Well, I thought the music would be good," he countered.
And it was.
Leading the charge were my friends, Lobo Marino, who began by addressing me, with Jameson saying, "We're not playing anything you haven't heard, Karen. Nothing new."
I didn't mind.
I'm a big fan of their tribal folk with harmonium and it wasn't long before a guy at the bar was so taken with Laney's harmonium playing that he moved closer to try to figure out the instrument.
Admitting that they hadn't had time to learn any U2 or Cranberries, they launched into their set.
Laney had told me earlier that she'd tried to learn one Irish song that had a lyric about drink, puke, die, but they didn't play that one, either.
And I feel safe in saying that Lobo Marino is the only local band who could have pulled out a papal gem for the occasion.
"This is dedicated to Francis Francis," they said before playing "Pope's Nose," an older song of theirs with great imagery ("Do you know the Pope? He picks at his nose") that I hadn't heard in a while.
They tried to go even older and play "Animal Hands" but for some reason Jameson had lost his voice, so that song wasn't happening.
The improvised a song instead and then ceded the floor to Williamsburg's Poisoned Dwarf (just as an influx of people came in the door), who'd been billed as a five-piece but were clearly six.
The most amazing part was how they managed to fit six guys and at least nine instruments (unique things like Scottish small pipes, a mini-bagpipe, and Irish flute) in an alcove that usually holds a two-top.
At one point, I feel sure I saw the fiddle player's elbow bonk the drummer's head.
They played Celtic music that had people clapping and toe-tapping by the second driving song.
A guy near me started dancing in his chair and then moving his arms in time until I reminded him that no arm motion is allowed in Irish dancing.
Besides the appealing variety of instruments the band played, they also traded them off to each other, so you never knew who'd be playing what.
At one point, a girl grinned and said to no one in particular, "I love Irish music!" to which her boyfriend responded, "That's because you're drunk."
It was funny, but the truth is when you have a bunch of musicians playing traditional Irish music with as much skilled musicianship as we were hearing, anybody's going to like Irish music.
Especially at a St. Patrick's Day party where no one pukes or dies.
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