Secret Bars Are Back In Vogue
Restaurants are expanding into separate, secluded cocktail spaces
Hello, and welcome to the last February edition of CulinaryWoman! Believe it or not, next Sunday is March 1st. And, Daylight Saving Time returns two weeks from today. In Michigan, all our snow melted, the temperature soared and then it plunged again, following by high winds. In other words, winter is not finished yet.
Today is the 4th anniversary of my book Satisfied Guaranteed. Hopefully, you saw my post yesterday and you’ll enter the giveaway for a signed copy. I also hope you’ll think about upgrading your subscription to keep CulinaryWoman in business.
Speaking of business, a number of restaurants are following a familiar path that is attracting a new audience: hideaway bars.
The Mystique of Seclusion
There’s something adventuresome about a bar that isn’t directly on the street, but which requires ingenuity to find. Of course, America had a lengthy association with speakeasies during the Prohibition Era from 1920 to 1933.
Supposedly, there was a speakeasy in my building in Brookline, Massachusetts, which sat opposite a station for the MBTA, aka the T.
Baseball legend Babe Ruth lived for a time in our building and I’ve always figured that proximity to alcohol played a role in his choice of a location. (The hidden bar is now an events space.)
Even after alcohol became legal again, there were secret drinking spots, called blind pigs or after hours joints, that operated under the radar. If you knew where to look, you could always find a drink (of course in New Orleans, places are allowed to serve 24 hours a day).
You might remember the song from The Pajama Game about a spot that was central to the plot.
I know a dark, secluded place
A place where no one knows your face
A glass of wine, a fast embrace
It's called Hernando's Hideaway, olé
A new generation of hideaway bars
In more-recent times, restaurant owners have turned basement storage space into hideaway bars. In 2018, chef Rick Bayless opened Bar Sotano, below his row of restaurants on Clark Street. You enter from the alley, and descend into a subtly lit spot that focuses on Mexican food and drink.
Ann Arbor has had a series of hidden bars, including Babs Underground, which opened down an Ashley Street stairway in 1997. Now, around the corner, it has new company.
Earlier this month, the owners of Echelon Kitchen and Bar at Main and Washington Streets opened Huna Bar, a 78-seat cocktail bar that’s entered from a side door on Washington. (Echelon, by the way, was recently named a James Beard Award finalist for the nation’s Best New Restaurant.)
I told a friend about the project, and she was skeptical. She had worked upstairs when Echelon was Mongolian Barbecue, a choose your own ingredients cafe. She remembered the basement as having a filthy floor and cables hanging from the ceiling.
It doesn’t look that way any more.
Secluded but glamorous
I carefully made my way down the stairs last week and into the tiki lounge to chat with beverage director Max Schikora, who designed the menu. There are classic Polynesian and Asian cocktails, some drinks of his own invention, and happily for me, a selection of non-alcoholic drinks.
Max laughed when I shared my friend’s description. Construction started from the bare walls, he said. Now, Huna looks like it could be a scene in Mad Men. It has a beaded curtain at the entrance, a private members’ room, romantic lighting and a sprawling bar where you might envision Elvis scoring a drink in Blue Hawaii.
Huna means both “house” and “hidden” in Hawaiian, and the idea of this bar is to make it like a vacation from the world upstairs. “Michigan has such gnarly winters,” Max said. “It’s a place where you can walk inside and say, ‘we’re definitely not in Michigan.’”
Menu prices begin at $14 for three N/A craft cocktails — a Negroni spritz, the Sesame, which has lime, cinnamon, passion fruit and roasted sesame oil, and the Coconut, with Coco Lopez, lime, cinnamon and nutmeg. The N/A drinks use faux alcohol ingredients from Little Saints.
The classic cocktail line up ranges from $15 to $22. There are old-school drinks like Planter’s Punch, Singapore Sling, Fog Cutter, Zombie and a Pina Colada. But Max created a series of drinks himself, based on training he received as a bartender at Mable Gray, a trendy suburban Detroit restaurant, and after pouring through vintage cocktail books.
The Not So Blue Hawaiian isn’t actually blue; it is inspired by Shark Attack gummy snacks, has a milk clarification base and is served in a milk carton. The Spicy Lover has serrano chile, lime, tequila and pineapple. The menu also includes spirit-filled bowls for $50 each that the menu stresses are “made for more than one person.”
Members wanted
Your eyebrows might go up at the prices, but that’s the price range for craft cocktails these days, and Huna is offering another option. Patrons can purchase memberships — another trend that I recently wrote about for Food & Wine.
Prices range from $150 a year for a casual explorer, who gets a free drink per month, private room access and access to members only nights. For $250 a year, a Tiki Enthusiast receives those perks, plus the ability to bring a guest to a members only night, a souvenir mug and tasting events.
The most expensive membership, the Founders Club, costs $350 a year. For that, VIPs will receive a luau with food and entertainment, and invitations to a variety of special events.
The memberships are already drawing interest. Max said he expected 50 people to sign up; so far, 100 members have subscribed across the different levels. For them, the prices make sense the $150 membership covers the cost of a monthly drink alone.
Clearly, people in Ann Arbor were ready for a tiki bar — Max said his staff crafted 150 cocktails on the bar’s first night in business. When I climbed up the stairs and into the foggy night, a line of customers stretched halfway down Washington Street.
Espresso Time For The Detroit Tigers
Tarik Skubal, the ace pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, is intense but not known for gourmet tastes. So, he surprised some of his teammates at spring training by giving them a gift: an espresso maker.
He and fellow pitcher Casey Mize went in on an entry-level machine that teammates can tap when they need a caffeine jolt. In an interview with MLB.com, Skubal admitted he’s a coffee novice.
“Usually you need a scale and some other things. We’re just eyeballing it,” Skubal said. “There's a lot of trial and error right now, but we're locking it in. Yesterday we probably brewed more [bad] ones than good ones, but we're getting there. We're getting there.”
The move came after veteran pitcher Charlie Morton bought an espresso machine for the Tigers clubhouse during his brief stint with the team last season. Morton, like several other MLB players, is deeply into coffee and regularly gave his teammates dissertations on brewing.
Skubal’s drink of choice is an iced Americano, which he finds more soothing than brewed coffee. A father of two, he’ll have one to start the day and a second 90 minutes to two hours before a game. His espresso limit, he said, is four shots.
A Wholesome Kind of Dining Club
In earlier times, college afforded an opportunity to hang out in bars and attend rowdy fraternity parties. But the current generation of students drinks much less alcohol than their predecessors. That’s led to a low-key kind of gathering at the University of Michigan.
Students are meeting regularly for the U-M Cereal Club, according to the Michigan Daily. It was founded last fall by seniors Ben Woodmansee and Frederick Aldinger, who post about the club on their Instagram account.
“It’s definitely grown into more than what we originally thought,” Ben told the Daily. “We thought it’d just be 10 or 12 of us just sitting around eating cereal, but it’s definitely grown more and we’ve made new friends from it.”
Tom Cavanaugh, a senior at the Ross School of Business, said he welcomes the casual atmosphere.
“The (Ross) club ecosystem is a very serious, intense environment, and the Cereal Club is really the antithesis to that,” he told the Daily. “We don’t focus on learning, we focus on experiencing and living in the moment and sharing these memories, bonding over cereal.”
The Descendants of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Are Not Happy
The grandson of the inventor of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups is upset with The Hershey Co. He’s accusing them of damaging the Reese's brand by shifting to cheaper ingredients in some candies.
According to the Associated Press, Brad Reese fired off a letter on Valentine’s Day to the Hershey’s corporate brand manager. He claimed that for multiple Reese’s products, the company replaced milk chocolate with compound coatings and peanut butter with a filling called peanut crème.
“How does The Hershey Co. continue to position Reese’s as its flagship brand, a symbol of trust, quality and leadership, while quietly replacing the very ingredients (Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter) that built Reese’s trust in the first place?” he wrote in the letter, which was posted on LinkedIn.
Brad is the grandson of H.B. Reese, who spent two years at Hershey before forming his own candy company in 1919. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were invented in 1928; his six sons eventually sold his company to Hershey in 1963.
Hershey says Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are made the same way they always have been, with milk chocolate and peanut butter that the company makes itself from roasted peanuts and other ingredients, including sugar and salt. But some Reese's ingredients vary, Hershey said.
That’s what has upset Brad. He said he bought a bag of Reese’s mini-hearts, a Valentine’s Day product, and threw them out. “It was not edible," he told the AP. "You have to understand. I used to eat a Reese's product every day. This is very devastating for me."
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