Baku’s premier Irish pub, Finnegans is, as you’d hope and expect, one of the few places in town to serve up a decent pint of the black stuff. Always busy, it gets rammed on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when a live band plays a folksy rock and Country and Western set to a wildly enthusiastic audience. The clientele is a friendly mix of expat and local, who all seem to enjoy the craic. Food is standard pub grub, but does feature perhaps the city’s only (and certainly a very decent) pie and mash as well as an all day breakfast, with – shock, horror – HP sauce (complete with Arabic branding and ingredient list). The pleasant setting is much like any other emerald isle themed pub in the world, with plenty of pub kitsch, proverbs on plaques about Paddy’s fondness of the bottle and so on.