John Kavanagh The Gravediggers

Beside the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery, on the north side of Dublin, a pub has been pouring pints since 1833, and it has been known by the work of its neighbours almost ever since. John Kavanagh — the Gravediggers to everyone who drinks there — sits on Prospect Square, where the men who dug the graves of Ireland's great and ordinary alike would come in for a pint between services. Two centuries later the cemetery is still across the wall, and the wooden snugs, the dark panelling and the quiet are still doing the same work they always did.

The order is a pint of Guinness, and it is the reason to come. This is not a bar for cocktails, or a big screen, or background music; it is a bar for conversation, and the pint is poured with the patience that Dublin treats as a matter of principle. There is food, and it is the old kind: coddle is the dish to know — a slow-cooked stew of sausages, rashers, potatoes and onions, once the Friday dinner of the city's tenements and now found in only a handful of places that still bother.

Come in the afternoon, when the light comes through the windows and the room is at its most itself, and stay for more than one. The pub is small, unpretentious and genuinely old, and because it sits away from the well-worn route through Temple Bar it still belongs to Glasnevin first — which is exactly why it is worth the trip north of the river.

Bourdain loved a pub that had not been tidied up for television, and the Gravediggers is one of the great ones: a room where history is not printed on the walls but simply continues, one unhurried pint at a time.