The area is New Orleans beautiful, brick building, iron terraces above, shuttered doors and windows lining the building across the street. Here, where the area transitions into the kind of ‘in-between’ area that starts when the French Market’s outdoor market ends, the streets are a little more open, the sidewalks a little less packed. And Molly’s is the spot to duck into, an Irish bar with a reputation for a particularly potent Irish coffee (which looks a little bit like a Swiss Roll crossed with a smoothie).
Below a blue sign that proclaims the space to be “A Free House” and through a curved brick archway, Molly’s is a one-room schoolhouse of a dive bar. Closed only for the hours between 6 AM and 10 AM each day, the space sits somewhere pleasantly between empty and crowded for nearly all of those hours. The room is opened to the street through routinely open windows and doors, making it feel connected to the activity outside. And that’s really the best drinking combination, full but not crowded, touching the world outside but pleasantly removed from it.
The decorations that line walls and ceiling run a pretty diverse gamut, from what look to be the reclaimed wooden signs of fallen Irish bars to a metal sign that once adorned a “pleasure coach” gifted to a lucky recipient by Larry Flynt. Stained glass sits over the doorway adjacent to the bar, simply proclaiming “Molly” in green lettering. And all manner of faded photograph line the opposite wall, documentation of drinking days gone by with only a seemingly loose connection among them.
