12/21/2023 0 Comments Home alone hidden bar nashvilleRiding the elevator up to Overstory and Manhatta, bars on the 64th and 60th floors of downtown skyscrapers, is filled with possibility. Plus, after a few years cooped up at home, and with bars slowly filling pandemic-emptied spaces, everything feels new and exciting. This isn’t, nor has it ever been, the exclusive domain of speakeasies, whose experiential potency has waned in a saturated field. You need to be on the inside: through the bookshelf at Denver’s Williams & Graham or down the staircase at The Drifter in Chicago. A once clearly defined category - an illegal bar serving alcohol during Prohibition - is now more about a feeling, a sense of discovery. That’s part of the problem with pinning down modern speakeasies and their place in drinking culture. At Hurley’s, a discreet side entrance led to an actual speakeasy in the building’s upper floors. The bar opened in February in a building that once housed Irish watering hole Hurley’s, first opened in 1892 and conveniently converted into a flower shop in 1920. Pebble Bar does not advertise itself as speakeasy, but with its imposing doorman, dark interior, ice-cold martinis, and history, it can’t help but feel like one. I had a comparable double-take experience entering Pebble Bar, set atop a cupcake shop near Rockefeller Center. Photo by Melissa Hom, courtesy of Keys & Heels Photo by Melissa Hom, courtesy of Keys & Heels The outside of Keys & Heels looks like your average shoe repair and key store in New York. A great cocktail alone can’t do that.” The outside of Keys & Heels looks like your average shoe repair and key store in New York. It gives them the opportunity to feel cool. “A secret entrance is something people want to share, to take friends to. “The magic is always alive,” says Jeff Bell, who bought PDT in 2020. “There’s this huge demographic ready to go out and dance and be in close proximity to a stranger.”īut there’s also something more universal and timeless about speakeasies’ appeal. “People are just celebrating being able to partake in nightlife, period,” says Jon Neidich, owner of several New York restaurants and bars, including The Nines, a piano bar that’s definitely-not-a-speakeasy (more on that later). The success of speakeasies right now is due, in part, to our general post-pandemic urge to party, connect, and drink great cocktails. Disney’s got one, and even Europe, where Prohibition never happened, is brimming with hidden bars. There’s a speakeasy slated for the Glassdoor office tower in San Francisco. and not one but two different Miami meat lockers. You can access speakeasies through a broken washing machine in Fort Worth, Texas the walk-in cooler of a pizza shop in Columbus, Ohio a janitor’s door in the back of a barber shop in a Las Vegas casino coffee shops in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles a Chinese herbal shop in San Diego, Calif. They’re all over TikTok and chances are, you can even book a seat on Resy.ĭespite the confusion, or perhaps because of it, the category is booming. Regardless of how hard it is to find them IRL, most have websites and Instagram accounts. There are speakeasies centered on exceptional cocktail programs and others with drinks so bad it’s as if the cocktail renaissance never happened. There are publications telling the world that bars are speakeasies or “speakeasy-style,” when they’re no such thing. There are barely concealed bars calling themselves speakeasies and hidden bars that shy away from the label. There were rules.īut that was a full 15 years ago and, for better or worse, speakeasies have become so mainstream, the term so co-opted, that the word speakeasy doesn’t really mean anything. For a decade or more, these speakeasies set the aesthetic tone for drinking: dark rooms, serious cocktails, and suspenders. That was the pull of mid-aught speakeasies like PDT, Little Branch, and Apotheke (and Milk & Honey, now Attaboy, and Angel’s Share before them) from which cocktail culture as we know it emerged.
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