In the Suburbs, Craft Cocktail Programs Finally Find a Home
There’s a term used to describe American suburbs: bedroom communities. The phrase evokes images of quiet towns dotted with strip malls, chain restaurants, and cultural malaise. These are towns where adults go to buy a single-family home, raise children, coach their kid’s Little League team, and grill meat on their deck during the summer. These are all pleasant activities.
They are also towns where, for the longest time, craft cocktails were tough to find. If you wanted to experience something beyond Dollaritas at the local Applebee’s, your best bet may have been to spend time and money trudging to the nearest big city, having fun, and figuring out a way to come back home responsibly.
But this is increasingly becoming a false narrative. Suburban craft cocktail programs are on the rise. Their presence may look like an anomaly to city slickers who don’t venture beyond their metropolitan borders for drinks. In reality, though, their time has come.
Filling a Need, Knowing Your Audience
There are two types of suburbanites: those who grew up in the ‘burbs, and those who moved there from the city.
Lifelong suburb dwellers tend to be comfortable with their surroundings. They carry a unique sense of civic pride. They experience city life in small doses through their job or the occasional weekend jaunt. These glimpses could spark curiosity in exploring craft cocktails if they grab a drink after work or before a night at the theater.
Suburban transplants have plenty of reasons for moving: the desire to own a home with a lawn and a two-car garage; extra room for an expanding family; the Covid-19-fueled work from home boom. If they loved cocktails while they lived in a city, the yen for a proper drink likely didn’t fade with an address change. Finding a craft cocktail spot amid a sea of chains could conveniently scratch this itch.
Jonathan Gonzalez understands both types of residents. When he launched Hunter & Thief in the Long Island burg of Lindenhurst, N.Y., in 2023, his rationale was partially pragmatic. “I opened Hunter & Thief in Lindenhurst because I’m a Long Islander first and foremost,” he says. “I also have two kids; one’s 7, the other one’s 2. I didn’t want to miss them growing up because I was running a bar in the city. I’d rather stay here and run a bar with my wife, who’s also my best friend.”
Lindenhurst is also roughly 40 miles from downtown Brooklyn and some 42 miles away from midtown Manhattan. These logistics helped inspire the bar’s location. “It was time to have a bar that let guests have their ‘Brooklyn/Manhattan experience’ without shelling out $200 for a sitter and cutting their experience in half due to commuting,” Gonzalez says. “If you took Hunter & Thief and put it in Williamsburg, we’d be doing the same thing.”
Credit: Hunter & Thief
In the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas, bar owner Tanner Agar is just about set to open Flamant, a European bistro-style restaurant that’s fully prepared to lean into the craft cocktail experience. The venue is a homecoming of sorts for Agar: He initially achieved suburban success through his venue Rye in nearby McKinney, Texas, which sadly burned down in 2022 after four years of operation. He jumped into the Dallas bar scene in 2021, launching Rye’s second location and its sister property Apothecary in Dallas’s lively Lower Greenville district. Running craft bar programs in the city has yielded fruits: Apothecary earned a regional nomination from Tales of the Cocktail for Best Restaurant Bar this year. Still, Agar notes his return to the suburbs provides its own unique reward, as it allows him to tap into what he feels is an underappreciated demographic.
“I won’t put a Hugo Spritz or a Negroni on the menu and treat it like it’s something guests haven’t experienced before.”
“In a way, suburban residents make better guests because they’re older and tend to be more knowledgeable about cocktails,” he says. “In Dallas, we may get younger crowds and they may not be in that part of their life cycle yet.”
Agar’s prior experience with the Dallas suburbs and their residents gives him a little more leeway to create Flamant’s menu. There’s a section of Espresso Martini variations, but there’s also drinks like the Octopus’ Garden, a Mojito riff featuring rum, cream sherry, and squid ink accompanied by a charred octopus garnish. He’s also anticipating a crowd of curious customers, and this expectation compelled him to compile a binder of drinks and spirits information of around 100 pages for his staff to digest. “We need to translate the menu to our guests,” he says. “For example, if we’re going to push a brandy cocktail on the menu, we need to be able to explain everything about the drink and everything about brandy, because the guests will ask.”
A Balanced Cocktail (Program)
It’s been 25 years since Milk & Honey lit the fuse that caused the craft cocktail scene to explode, so it’s not too surprising to see some of its shrapnel settle in the suburbs. Thanks to the exchange of information via social media and upticks in home-bar experimentation during the pandemic, some suburbanites may belly up to the bar with a decent measure of knowledge. Some suburban bar owners feel it’s important to acknowledge this through their menu offerings. “I won’t put a Hugo Spritz or a Negroni on the menu and treat it like it’s something guests haven’t experienced before,” Agar says.
But not all potential customers possess such understanding, which could make opening a craft cocktail spot in the suburbs a tricky proposition. In 2019, Luiz Fernandes opened the Brazilian-themed Ember & Alma in the Boston suburb of Framingham, Mass., because of lower operational costs and its large Brazilian population (including himself). Success wasn’t immediate, nor was the connection to the community. “In the beginning, people didn’t know what to make of our space,” he admits.
Fernandes eventually won the neighborhood by recognizing where they were at on their cocktail journey and focusing on bartending basics. “Chains are all the suburbs had for a long time,” he says. “Even as this was shifting, we were still explaining to guests that we were using real ingredients and weren’t doing things like using pre-mixes.”
Credit: Ember & Alma
Fernandes’s situation captures what may be the ultimate challenge behind running a suburban bar. On one hand, social media dropped the barrier to get into cocktails to unprecedented lows, and certain classics like a Negroni enjoy the kind of high profile they didn’t have 20 years ago. On the other hand, the techniques and technical jargon behind craft cocktails remain a mystery to many suburban drinkers who don’t know about the purpose of a big ice cube or the existence of legacy bars like Employees Only or PDT. Bridging the gap is essential, and it may take a while for a bar to find the sweet spot.
“You won’t find a place like Death & Co. in Orange County. But what we can do here is try to capture and maintain the kind of vibe you may find in those kinds of places.”
“The first menu we made was overly progressive and technical,” Gonzales says. “We had to change it so we weren’t bombarding the guests with words. Our menu now is progressive, but friendly. We still put information on the menu, but we’re also describing what the drink is. If a drink is like a strawberry Margarita, we will say the drink is like a strawberry Margarita.”
When a suburban bar achieves such a balance, it naturally places bartenders into a position to educate guests on the basics, even as they’re respecting other guests and what they may already know. It’s a line that they enjoy walking. “You still look for teaching moments, where you can offer gentle hand-holding,” Fernandes says. “That’s where growth happens.”
An Ideal Partnership
Independent restaurants play an important role in the suburbs, as they give residents options other than chains serving predictable, rut-inducing fare. They also provide a gentle entry point for suburban craft cocktail infiltration.
These types of eateries form the backbone of the craft cocktail scene in Orange County, Calif., a county chiefly consisting of bedroom communities wedged between L.A. and San Diego. Craft cocktails not attached to a sit-down joint are rare to come by in O.C., which can frustrate those in the mood for a nightcap after 9 p.m. The bartenders running these programs understand their limitations and do what they can to build community around these parameters.
“You won’t find a place like Death & Co. in Orange County,” explains Inga Tantisalidchai, mixologist and bar lead at OLEA in Newport Beach, Calif. “But what we can do here is try to capture and maintain the kind of vibe you may find in those kinds of places.”
Credit: Inga Tantisalidchai
For Tantisalidchai, building rapport with guests through creativity curates this vibe. OLEA’s standard craft-focused drinks menu reserves an open slot for her to produce a rotating cocktail of the month, with which she can introduce her customers to innovative techniques and potentially unfamiliar ingredient combinations. Since her regulars range from curious younger folks to wealthy retirees stuck in their ways, she’s learned to soften whatever perceived edges her creations may have. For example, she named her latest drink Strawberry Fields Forever because she believes referencing a classic Beatles song could coax her older patrons to try a cocktail consisting of strawberry purée, Thai chili, pineapple, and yuzu.
When Tantisalidchai’s customers forgo her monthly cocktail and request a “dealer’s choice,” she’ll roll her set of Mover & Shaker’s dealer’s dice to determine the drink’s spirit, flavor profile, and style. The process occasionally results in something deeper than cheeky fun. “There have been several times where a customer told me, ‘I want this cocktail every time I come by,’ she says. “When that happens, I’ll write down the recipe and name it after them — not their literal name, but something that connects to them and their character. When they come back with friends, they love to talk about how they have their own customized drink on the menu.”
A Hospitable Place
Craft cocktails unquestionably have a home in the suburbs. The reason why ultimately has very little to do with the cocktail’s quality. A drink provides the impetus for guests to revel in the experience of an exquisite evening out. This is true regardless of the address of either the venue or the guest. “Just because you live in the suburbs doesn’t mean you don’t want an elevated experience,” Fernandes notes.
Some may even argue that using the drinks to anchor the guest experience may be a larger point of focus for suburban spots than their big city counterparts. Their rationale ties directly to the lack of recognition beyond a ‘burb’s city limits. “A suburban bar or bartender can have ambition, but they already know they’re not going to win any awards,” Gonzales says. “So instead of going for awards, we have to go hard into creating an experience for guests instead.”
This emphasis on experience feels rather appropriate for a bar in the suburbs. After all, such a focus can create comfort and familiarity, inherent hallmarks of the suburban lifestyle that lifetime residents tend to love and new transplants may crave. That so many of these spaces are also making and teaching guests about delicious cocktails is the bonus round. These bars may be in “bedroom communities,” but it seems foolish to sleep on them completely.
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