If the Maryland Irish Festival holds its meetings at your pub, if children are a welcome and regular presence there, if the only live music there is played acoustically and involves pipes and fiddles and the poetry of Robert Burns, well, then you're running an actual Irish pub. And J. Patrick's has been doing so in Locust Point for eons. Long before Mick O'Shea's and Slainte and Claddagh and Tir Na Nog and Maggie Moore's came on the local scene, there was J. Patrick's. "They might have Irish names," the barkeep there says on a recent afternoon, when the Irish Festival folks were holding court and talking about Irish pubs in Frederick and Hagerstown, "but they're not Irish pubs." So what makes one? "The people who come, the families and kids, the all-Irish music," he explains. Just then, a whole family walks in, kids in tow, takes a table, and orders Guinness and grub. We see what he means.

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