Nearly four thousand miles separate Ireland from the coast of Georgia, but when you’re sitting in a booth in Savannah’s newest Irish pub with a pint of Guinness in front of you, that distance feels a whole lot shorter. At Wexford, which opened in the Historic District late last summer, there’s shepherd’s pie and fish and chips; live pub songs playing upstairs; and mementos from the Emerald Isle tucked into every nook. In fact, the bar’s entire winding, two-story interior—the bric-a-brac–filled snugs and stained-glass–lined booths that surround the 360-degree bar touting taps of both local and Irish favorites—was designed and built in Ireland, then shipped to Savannah and assembled.
“We wanted to celebrate why the Irish are so important in Savannah with a high-end Irish pub,” says Jennifer Strickland, who runs Wexford with her brother, Tim, and business partner Chris Swanson. (Jennifer and Tim also own River Street Sweets, the city’s fifty-year-old praline and toffee empire.)
The Irish have been a part of Georgia’s population since James Edward Oglethorpe brought over the first batch of European settlers in 1733, but the influx intensified in the 1840s, when the potato famine wiped out the country’s main food source. (Look it up: Before the famine, in 1840, the average Irish man ate around fourteen pounds of potatoes a day.) By 1860, it’s estimated that one in three white households in Savannah comprised Irish-born immigrants.
To get the feel just right, Strickland and her team joined forces with Darren Fagan and the Irish Pub Company, a Dublin-based firm that consults on Irish pubs opening around the world, and Howard Keeley at Georgia Southern University’s Center for Irish Research and Teaching. “We needed a story,” Strickland says. “We didn’t want it to be cheesy but rather get to the crux of what connects Ireland and Savannah.” That story came when they found an 1850 edition of the Wexford Independent, in which the city of Savannah advertised itself as a favorable place for Irish immigrants. Turns out, around 55 percent of Irish descendants in Savannah can trace their lineage back to County Wexford.
That advertisement is now framed inside the pub alongside other tokens from the Old World: a tile mosaic in the entryway depicting Wexford’s famous lighthouse; art, photographs, and knickknacks sourced from County Wexford thrift stores; books by some of the Irish literary greats, so that customers can cozy up in a corner and read. “Literally everything in the building besides the knives, glasses, and forks was made in Ireland and shipped over here,” Strickland says.
The food, too, is authentic: corned beef and cabbage; Guinness-tinged pot roast; pan-seared cod. The menu came together after the team took a trip to Ireland, in which Strickland “ate Irish soda bread twice a day for nine days,” she says, laughing. “We wanted to get the food right.”
For its inaugural St. Patrick’s Day this year, Wexford will celebrate with an outdoor stage and a full slate of local musicians, Irish dancers, and bagpipers—plus a float in the city’s parade. But the festivities don’t stop when the fountains stop flowing green. This spring, Wexford is also sponsoring Savannah’s new hurling team and hosting delegates from Wexford, Ireland. As Strickland says, “We’re looking at St. Patrick’s Day more like a season.”
