Like Christmas Decorations, Holiday Pop-Up Bars Arrived Earlier Than Ever This Year
Christmas is over a month away, and I’m sitting in a bar that feels like being locked inside Santa Claus’s workshop with alcohol, surrounded by shimmering red and silver tinsel, writing a Christmas card to Mariah Carey. A woman wearing a knit holiday sweater with blinking lights and a headband with reindeer antlers shimmies past me and slides her letter to Mariah into the drop box by the entrance. It didn’t feel like Christmas before I walked in — Thanksgiving was still days away — and now it feels like someone vomited Christmas all over the bar.
It’s the 30th anniversary of Carey’s ubiquitous holiday anthem “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and, to commemorate the milestone, she launched a series of holiday pop-up bars across the country. The Black Irish Holiday Bar, developed in partnership with Virgin Hotels and Bucket Listers, was launched Nov. 15 in New York, Dallas, New Orleans, Nashville, and Chicago. It’s a place for lustful Mariah Carey fans and the Christmas- obsessed to sip treacly Martinis made with three variations of Black Irish, Carey’s Bailey’s-style Irish cream, while being bombarded by an all-Mariah playlist of seemingly every Christmas song she’s ever recorded shuffling on repeat.
As far as I can tell, everyone who’s ponied up $22 for an admission ticket (which includes a welcome drink) appears to be very serious about Christmas and even more serious about Mariah Carey. At least a quarter of the attendees are singing along with Mariah the whole time, a figure that doubles when “All I Want For Christmas Is You” starts blaring.
For the many dedicated fans of holiday pop-up bars, Christmas came early this year. Cloying eggnogs dusted with nutmeg, spiked hot chocolates with charred marshmallows, wintry Hot Toddies with warming spices, and gingerbread Old Fashioneds have hijacked the bar scenes of major cities across the country going back to mid-November, inundating bar goers with the holiday spirit in liquid form more aggressively than ever
A Long Way From Miracle Bar
This year marks a decade since the original Miracle Bar, Cocktail Kingdom’s Christmas-themed pop-up, opened in the space that inhabited the original Mace bar on 9th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. From its humble beginnings and subsequent Sippin’ Santa-branded spinoffs, there are now over 200 satellite locations across the world that have signed on to cosplay Christmas using Cocktail Kingdom’s tried-and-true templates. But this year — as with Mariah Carey’s Black Irish Holiday Bar, which opened two weeks before Thanksgiving — the party started in mid-November.
Credit: Bucket Listers
Sam Gauthier was a member of the opening team at the original Sippin’ Santa pop-up at The Boilermaker, Mace’s sister bar, in New York in 2015. Today he manages bar operations at the Dead Rabbit’s new outpost of its popular Jingle Jangle pop-up at Pier 17 in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, which opened Nov. 21 to accommodate overflow from the pop-up at the bar’s Water Street location that’s operated seasonally since 2022. Gauthier credits the early opening date with giving the bar team, mostly seasonal hires, extra time to master the cocktail recipes before the holidays kick into high gear.
Credit: Eric Medsker
The same is true at Snowday in Brooklyn, a Christmas themed pop-up at Sunday in Brooklyn in Williamsburg, which opened earlier this season than it has in its seven-year existence. “We inched back the opening even earlier than we normally would so the bartenders could sharpen their knives and get used to the holiday menu flip before things get chaotic,” says Brian Evans, director of bars for Sunday Hospitality Group.
Great Jones Distillery Co., Manhattan’s first whiskey distillery since Prohibition, opened its Whiskey Wonderland holiday pop-up two weeks before Thanksgiving this year, not only because last year’s demand was so high but also because opening earlier increases foot traffic. “Holiday pop-ups incentivize locals and travelers to visit the distillery, often for the first time,” says Rodrigo Braun, the distillery’s brand experience director. Across the river in Jersey City, Cellar 335 also launched its tiki-inflected holiday bar Sleighs & Leis on Nov. 19, after having run it only through the month of December in previous years.
Let The Christmas Freak Flag Fly
According to Gauthier, as holiday pop-ups have gained traction, they’ve also developed a motivated — and often fully costumed — fan base of holiday bar crawlers that comes out of the woodwork early and often. “There are people that have been waiting with bated breath since last December to pull the sweaters back out and let their Christmas freak flag fly,” he says. This past Saturday at the Dead Rabbit’s flagship pop-up on Water Street was the busiest night in the bar’s 11-year history, including every St. Patrick’s Day.
“Celebrate Christmas in October. Do whatever you need to do to make yourself happy in this hellscape we’re living in. I think many people need a happy respite from all of the s*it that’s going on.”
In years past, most bar owners would be content to plug-n-play the Miracle Bar or Sippin’ Santa rubrics into their own bars, despite the significant upfront licensing fees. But now many bar industry professionals say the model is becoming prohibitively expensive and hampering creative freedom. “You have to follow a set of guidelines about what your decor looks like and what the cocktails are,” says Demi Natoli, the beverage director of Nashville’s White Limozeen. “They even have people that come in to check that you’re following all the parameters that they set in place.”
Credit: Demi Natoli
Going it alone for the bar’s “Classic Christmas” pop-up the past three years, Natoli and her team are better able to showcase more local spirit brands and cater to Nashville bar patrons who prefer hard whiskey cocktails over spiked hot apple cider. It also gives the bar more quality control, ensuring that every cocktail recipe on the holiday menu meets its rigorous standards. Many tenured bars like Dead Rabbit eschew the franchise model as a matter of personal pride. “When you’re an established enough bar,” says Gauthier, “not doing it yourself would send a message to the public that you think that someone else is doing it better.”
A Holiday Bump in Revenue
Installing a holiday pop-up can have a meaningful impact on a bar’s bottom line. The financial opportunity presented by these seasonal concepts has encouraged many luminaries in the craft cocktail world to throw their hats in the ring. Kelsey Ramage (of Trash Tiki fame) and Erin Hayes (formerly of Chicago’s Lost Lake) started their Krampus Cove pop-up in Los Angeles three seasons ago and have added new partner bars every year since. “Last year we did two venues and they each saw about a 70 percent increase in revenue over the month of December,” Hayes says. This year, she and Ramage have tripled the number of participating bars to six venues across five different cities.
Credit: Bucket Listers
Even Hanukkah-themed bars are popping up early this year, despite the Jewish holiday landing much later than usual on Dec. 28. The Maccabee Bar pop-up was launched right after Thanksgiving at Noir Bar in Cambridge, Mass. “The hard part about running a Hanukkah bar, unlike a Christmas bar, is that Hanukkah happens at a different time every year,” says Naomi Levy, who founded the concept in 2018. “The first year, we only did it for one week during the week of Hanukkah.” But sales have consistently exceeded expectations over the ensuing years, making it worthwhile for her partner bars to launch the pop-up early, regardless of where the holiday falls on the calendar.
Hayes posits that the explosion of premature holiday pop-ups this year might be driven by escapism in the aftermath of a contentious election cycle that has a lot of Americans feeling anxious. “Celebrate Christmas in October. Do whatever you need to do to make yourself happy in this hellscape we’re living in,” she says. “I think many people need a happy respite from all of the s*it that’s going on.”
Midway through my escape at the Mariah Carey pop-up, the bartender dropped a matted clump of blue cotton candy into the “MC Martini” I ordered, a concoction made with white chocolate-flavored Black Irish that tasted like melted ice cream. Before the spun sugar fully dissolved into the drink, he sprinkled edible confetti over the top. Meanwhile, a steady stream of Christmas-happy people shuffled into the room, some wearing droopy Santa hats, stopping to take selfies inside a photo booth with a life-size cardboard cutout of the “Queen of Christmas.” I doubt Mariah will ever get the letter I left in the drop box, but I thanked her for her inspiring music and, expressed as nicely as I could, that all I want for Christmas is a plain old gin Martini.
The article Like Christmas Decorations, Holiday Pop-Up Bars Arrived Earlier Than Ever This Year appeared first on VinePair.