The Adam Project | The Blarney Stone, Carrall Street — a drink with a mother who doesn't know him

The best scene in the film has no jets in it. A grown man sits down beside a woman at a bar, buys her a drink, and tells her that her son is going to be fine. She has no idea she is talking to him. Ryan Reynolds plays it small and Jennifer Garner plays it smaller, and the whole thing happens in a pub on Carrall Street in Gastown.

The Blarney Stone has been at 216 Carrall since the early 1970s, which makes it one of the longest-running Irish pubs in the city. It is not a quiet place most nights — the room turns over to live bands and dancing on the weekend, and it has hosted enough stag parties to fill a small province. On a weekday afternoon, though, it is dim and wooden and almost empty, and you can see why a location scout put a conversation about grief in it.

Carrall Street itself is where Vancouver started. Gastown burned to the ground in 1886, thirteen months after incorporation, and was rebuilt in brick within a year — which is why the block reads as one continuous late-Victorian wall. The cobbles are a 1970s restoration, laid when the neighbourhood was saved from a freeway. Maple Tree Square is a minute north; the steam clock is three minutes west.

Order something, take the seat nearest the door, and watch the street through the glass. The film's most honest line was delivered from roughly that stool.

216 Carrall Street, Vancouver. Open daily.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.