City: Delray Beach, FL

Category: Nightlife

Telephone: (561) 272-7272

Address: 804 East Atlantic Ave.

Description: Welcome to the Blue Anchor Pub, mate, where the colors (colours!) of Great Britain are displayed proudly, you can still get a shandy (warm beer and lemonade), and it wouldn’t hurt to know the latest “football” score between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur. This place is unabashedly and delightfully British (and it wouldn’t hurt if you knew what the “chips” are in “fish ‘n chips”).It’s a true 19th-century British pub, located right on the Intracoastal on hoppin’ Atlantic Avenue. It was Zagat-rated four years in a row (2004–07). There’s a full lunch and dinner menu seven days a week. It probably has more draught beers from the British Isles than anyone else west of Piccadilly, among them Guinness, Harp, Bass, Boddingtons, Smithwick’s, and Newcastle Brown Ale, as well as three different Fuller’s hand-drawn ales. You walk in through 8-foot-high English Oak front doors. Inside, you’re back in the 19th century with authentic Tudor architecture featuring bay windows with wrought-iron grilling dividing them up into small sections, dark woods, V-shaped paneling running across the white walls, old-fashioned little wall lamps, British flags, soccer emblems, dark-wood beams on the ceilings, and wooden columns with coats-of-arms carved into them. Dishes include toad-in-the-hole (Yorkshire pudding), scotch egg (hard-boiled egg wrapped in a sausage), the ploughman’s salad, bangers and mash (sausages, potatoes, and British beaked beans), and, of course, fish ‘n’ chips.The Blue Anchor Pub is a homage to a pub of the same name erected in London in 1864, a time when Jack the Ripper prowled the London streets in search of his next victim, and when Queen Victoria ruled half the world. In fact, it actually is the original Blue Anchor Pub. The entire exterior of the pub, including those huge oak doors, was actually part of the original pub, and was shipped here in 1996. Many famous people walked through those doors, among them Winston Churchill; and, according to legend, a couple of Jack the Ripper’s female victims spent their last nights carousing here before meeting a bloody end on the streets outside. If you happen to hear footsteps from the attic while you’re here, they’re probably those of Bertha Starkey, who was killed here in the early 1900s when her jealous husband found her in the arms of another man. Bertha’s ghost has received plenty of coverage in the media. And some folks maintain that she’s the only ghost who ever survived a trans-Atlantic crossing!