Everyone Involved Needs to Be Arrested

A review of San Patricios, Jersey City

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Feargal and I walked into an Irish-Mexican cantina. There was sawdust on the floor. Feargal, who is from Dublin, told me this was an Irish thing. I had no choice but to believe him. Seeking ethnic credibility of my own, I searched for some visibly Mexican element of the place to demystify. I was on the verge of fabricating a backstory about the indoor tree when Feargal, menu in hand, declared, “They have poitín!”

I asked what that was. He said it was Irish moonshine. “It makes you blind,” he smiled, as if fondly recalling a recipe from his childhood. I’d assumed poitín was a Mexican drink I’d never heard of, given the accent over the “i.” A great American question: “To which culture belongs this ‘I?’” Feargal and I agreed to honor our ancestors by getting drunk.

When I saw a clip on Instagram about San Patricios, a recently opened Mexican-Irish fusion restaurant in Jersey City, it was obvious to me that A) I would eat there and B) I would bring Feargal, the most Irish person I know (apologies to my many O’Cquaintances, but, yes, there is a ranking). The video advertised corned beef tacos, Irish cheddar queso dip, and chicken tinga pot pie. The comments were predictable. “Everyone involved needs to be arrested,” read a popular response with 400+ likes.

I saw myself in this controversial restaurant. According to my Ancestry.com test results, which I got before learning that doing so granted the government permission to clone me, my two main ancestral regions are “Indigenous Americas” (Mexico) and “Celtic & Gaelic” (Ireland). I intermittently receive emails reporting that my results have been updated, but this hasn’t once revealed anything interesting. I’d like to wake up one day, check my email, and discover that I’m Czech. Czech-Mex.

There are few things more American than a corporation assigning you an ethnicity over email. But I am an American. It feels good to say that. Not because I’m proud to say it, but because saying it feels like a confession. My peers are all dissociating from the national narrative, sourcing identity in some form of otherness, or pretending New York City is a country. I don’t blame them.

San Patricios occupies the bones of a former Irish pub. This gives it the vibe of a Boston establishment in a delirious fugue state. It was packed the night Feargal and I went. I, embracing my Americanness (an identity that, when embraced, is indistinct from mania), had decided I was a restaurant critic and emailed the place announcing my intent to swing by. This ended up paying off. We were given the works: a mezcal tasting, cocktails, and several courses.

Our Scotch egg arrived; gooey yellow eyes staring up from a bed of frijoles negros with chives sprinkled on top. I don’t know what the quintessential Scotch egg experience is supposed to be, but this one was delicious: jammy yolk hugged by juicy chorizo, nestled in a crunchy crumb coat with a little kick. This is what I don’t get about the feigned offense over San Patricios’ menu. What cuisine wouldn’t benefit from getting a little Mexican with it? Mexicans are already making the food anyway, which people would know if they’d ever worked in a kitchen.

Feargal ordered the Guinness I’d assigned him for homework. I selected a fruity cocktail called The Countess that had Guinness in it. We were seated beside an alcove with a Frida Kahlo candle, she being the patron saint of Mexican restaurants in the U.S. that serve $20 cocktails, and a coffee table book about The Troubles. The Countess entered my all-time top three. The Guinness lent it a silky little something.

“Look at that!” Feargal said, tilting his glass so the foam teetered over the lip without spilling. “That’s good Guinness right there.” Between the mezcal and the poitín margaritas and The Countesses, we got blindingly drunk. We became polemicists.

Americans, not exactly famous for our couth, tend to become wooden on the subject of ethnic identity. It’s a sacred concept here, which is why fusion cuisine is so often maligned as a chimeric abomination. A person will drive their Japanese car to drop their kids off at Chuck E. Cheese to gorge on recently invented syrups while staring into dubiously sourced phones watching AI-generated reels on Facebook of baby lawyers arguing with each other in baby court without thinking much about it, but bring up ethnicity and food and that same person will take on a priestly air and speak, with great authority and barely concealed enthusiasm, on what constitutes genuine articles of their grandmother’s country’s cuisine, music, or traditions. Authenticity matters a great deal to us, in niche instances.

How did ethnic identity come to be such a sacred cow? Guilt can’t be discounted. Claiming descent from a different country is a move toward absolution from our country’s sins: Native American removal, racialized chattel slavery, segregation, forced regime changes, unjustified invasions, and Christian rap, to name but a few of the evil handkerchiefs flowing from the sleeve.

But white Americans, while famous for this kind of behavior, aren’t the only ones. Mexican-Americans are doubtlessly familiar with a distinctly Chicano form of visual art that commonly features, among other favored subjects, an Aztec warrior bearing a damsel in his arms (she is usually unconscious for some reason) with a pyramid looming in the backdrop. This is, I’m sorry to say, altogether goofy, but nonetheless beautifully expresses a desperate romanticism that seems endemic to the United States: a desire for roots in some place other than this, our graceless national project.

Many of us in this multi-ethnic empire partake of this custom: cosmetic association with the aesthetics of dead empires in symbolic repudiation of the one we presently inhabit. Dead empires have all the best stuff. A living empire, meanwhile, is less appealing, because it looks like the United States.

I voiced some of these thoughts to Feargal.

The problem as I see it, Feargal, is that American culture is a style of consumerism. No one wants to identify with it because it is itself a mode of wanting. Customerly impatience. Customerly ingratitude. So people dissociate. So people buy DNA kits hoping to be assigned a real identity. You’ve got this influencer class policing authenticity all day, spouting off about what cultures can be mixed, who can cook what, while talking the same way and thinking the same way, because they’re on the same tech platforms. Because they’re consumers. “Phone” is more of a coherent identity for these people than anything else. Their language is Phone and their culture is Phone. And what I’m trying to say, Feargal, is that building a brand on dissatisfaction with everything is itself American, a profit-motivated pageant divorced from the sweaty, sputtering guts of the thing.

Our chicken tinga pot pie arrived. Pollo tinga, corn, peas, and potatoes under a crisp pastry shell. The team behind San Patricios is the same one behind the Dead Rabbit, one of my favorite bars in New York. I doubted the Dead Rabbit would risk its reputation on a gimmick. It was unsurprising that the menu was an unequivocal triumph in the admittedly niche genre of Irish-Mexican fusion.

The real history behind the name is fascinating. It’s not every day they name a restaurant after U.S. Army deserters, after actual traitors. The San Patricios were Irish immigrants serving in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. They looked around, remembered they were Catholic, said “fuck this,” and swam across the Rio Grande to fight for the other side.

I certainly lack the courage to do that sort of thing. But, in their honor, I’m happy to eat at a restaurant. I recommend the churros for dessert.