The Bishop's Collar

It's Where We Drink

by Will Dean

2349 Fairmount Ave., 215-765-1616

With its religious-themed name and an antique church pew greeting guests as they enter, savvy drinkers might worry that the Bishop's Collar would be more likely to host a prayer meeting than a pub crawl. But this neighborhood bar owes its name to a misremembered story about the most famous Irish beer in the world.

"We thought the name meant a perfectly poured pint of Guinness, where the foam matches the white of a bishop's collar," explains owner Jeff Keel, who opened the bar eight years ago. "Then, we found out it was actually an Irish term for a terrible Guinness, with too much foam on the top." Keel decided to keep the moniker anyway, because "people love the story."

Then there's the business of the pew. A friend of Keel's spotted the old, wooden church seat, which blends in well with the bar's burgundy walls, at a bazaar in Scranton. It was so perfect for the decor that it was well worth the effort of loading the ungainly devotional object into the back of a pickup. The Collar's dimensions are similar to a row home—though the building has housed a bar of some kind since 1948—so the 8-foot-long seat fits snugly inside the bar.

Even if you haven't sat in a pew in a while, or even set foot inside a church, there's always something to believe in at the Bishop's Collar. "We usually rotate our selection of beers, but we always have Harps, Bass and, of course, Guinness on tap," Keel says reverently.

Amen to that.