Food & Drink

Jolly green giant

On St. Patrick’s Day 46 years ago, Jimmy Neary opened his bar and restaurant for business on East 57th Street, and if he’d taken the weather as an omen, he might have closed up shop then and there.

“There was freezing rain, and it was awful. Atrocious,” he says. “You couldn’t walk — the street was like a sheet of glass.”

But if the foul weather was a curse on Neary’s debut, the run that’s followed could only be called charmed. Just ask Neary, who at 82 can still be found nightly in his namesake establishment, where he holds court seven days a week, greeting each visitor with a soft Irish burr, a wide smile and an infectious energy. Ask the four waitresses who’ve been here for 4½ decades apiece, including Liz Farrelly, who’s worked at Neary’s since the day it opened. (The “new girls” on the staff have a mere 36 and 30 years tenure each.)

Or query the crowds who will jam the place this weekend, among them the many politicians and Irish-American dignitaries who make a beeline for Neary’s after the parade each year.

Longtime patron Mike Bloomberg dependably winds up here on St. Paddy’s Day; George Pataki did likewise when he was governor. President Bill Clinton, Hugh Carey, Ed Koch, Teddy Kennedy, Tip O’Neill and scores of other pols are among the notables who’ve bent an elbow here.

And that’s not to mention the devoted regulars who’ve returned for decades to Neary’s. These include many who came to the restaurant with their parents and now bring their own kids, perhaps to be waited on by Neary’s daughter Una, a partner at Goldman Sachs who still serves plates of lamb chops and corned beef each weekend and every St. Patrick’s Day — or “high holy day,” to use her phrase.

“For so many people it’s a home,” says the crime novelist Mary Higgins Clark, a patron for more than 40 years. “He makes everyone feel like his day was made when they walked in the door.”

Neary’s path to East 57th Street began back in the Irish town of Tubbercurry, in County Sligo, where he got his start in the hospitality industry as a 15-year-old bar apprentice. He was a bartender making a few dollars a week when a friend of his mother’s who’d emigrated to the US asked if he’d like to come, with her as his sponsor.

Neary jumped at the chance and arrived in 1954, finding an apartment in The Bronx and a job as a porter at the New York Athletic Club. The restaurateur P. J. Moriarty was a member, and when he offered the industrious porter a job at his namesake restaurant on Sixth Avenue and 52nd Street, Neary began working nights there as a “bar boy” and coat checker.

He became a full-time bartender at Moriarty’s after a stint in the army, and met his wife-to-be Eileen there when a golf buddy brought her in for drinks. “I lost him and got Eileen,” he says. They married in 1963 and moved to Demarest, NJ, where they would raise four children.

It was a fellow bartender, Brian Mulligan, who spied a newspaper ad for a bar and restaurant for lease at 358 E. 57th St. The pair put $500 down; three months later they opened for business, with Mulligan pulling the day shift and Neary working the bar from 6 p.m. until 4 a.m.

Later they hired bartenders, and Neary settled into his role as host and manager, and little has changed since those first days. The red-leather banquettes and mahogany-paneled walls remain. And there’s still a strictly enforced dress code — no T-shirts, shorts or sneakers.

Neary credits the dress code with helping to maintain a genteel, neighborly atmosphere. Potential rowdies “see the carpet, and everybody dressed at the bar, and they’re gone.”

From the beginning, those who’ve stuck around have included a good number of notables: John Glenn gave Neary a thrill when he stopped in post-orbit in 1969, and governor-to-be Hugh Carey, then a congressman, was an early regular.

“He sent me an autographed picture. I put it on the wall [to show] I knew somebody important,” says Neary.

The walls are now lined with such pictures. There’s Bill and Hillary Clinton, who stopped in on New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago. There’s Mayor Bloomberg, a longtime friend, who flew Neary to Ireland on his private jet when he went to County Sligo in 2006.

There’s George H.W. Bush, who hosted Jimmy and Eileen Neary at a White House dinner honoring Sen. George Mitchell for his peace efforts in Northern Ireland, and Timothy Cardinal Dolan, a longtime friend who invited Jimmy and Una to the Vatican in 2012. (Eileen is now deceased.)

Also hanging on the wall are book jackets from longtime regulars Kathie Lee Gifford and Higgins Clark, who’s given Neary cameos in 20 of her books.

“I’ve never read one of them,” admits Neary cheerfully. “She sends me an autographed copy and tells me what pages I’m on, so I don’t have to look for it.”

But what’s more notable than the notables who’ve patronized Neary’s are the connections Neary has built with dozens of less recognizable patrons. As he sits at a corner table reminiscing, Neary’s stories are filled with references to driving patrons who’ve had a few too many home to The Bronx or Queens, to inviting a bachelor regular to Christmas dinner with his family.

When the dinner crowd starts filing in and the tables fill, he’s a whirlwind of bonhomie, offering greetings and pats on the back, pulling out chairs for ladies, taking coats, offering congratulations on a promotion and inquiring after family members.

“It’s lovely, this life,” says Neary, between greetings. “Everybody’s smiling. They might be a sourpuss when they come in, but they won’t be when we get done talking to them.”

The one problem he has with the job is putting it down. He works seven days a week, arriving at about 11 a.m. after attending morning mass in New Jersey, and working until at about midnight.

He took 10 days off last year, for a trip to Ireland, but “it was too long for me — I couldn’t wait to get back,” he says. He likes to keep busy, but the deeper connection is “a love of people,” he says. “That’s my wealth — the people I have met, and the customers that come in here.”

That family will crowd into the bar today starting at about 10 a.m., and linger till well after midnight.

But one thing Neary won’t do to celebrate is raise a glass — despite working in bars for nearly 70 years, “I’ve never had a drink in my life,” he says.

And there’s one other St. Patrick’s Day tradition he’s never observed: He’s never seen the parade.

“Never, since the day I came to America,” he says. “I’m always working.”

chris.erikson@nypost.com