The truth is, the modern-day bartender is only getting more dapper, as evidenced by many craft cocktail bars across the country, and this razorback is making it look easy. Razorbacks are not only adept at keeping the peace inside their bars, but they roll Bloody Marys without spillage with the best of them, and manage to style and profile like no other. Is that tailored shirt J. Crew?
Arkansas
The one and only Natural State is full of apple blossoms, spinach, championship duck calling, mockingbirds, pine trees, fiddles, diamonds, hot springs, and the first Walmart ever opened, in Rogers. Arkansas was the French interpretation of the Sioux word acansa, meaning “downstream place.”
When I was very young, my dad used to take me to a bar called Hugo’s here in Fayetteville. One of those times he ordered a Black and Tan. That was definitely one of the first drinks I tried. When I got older, my family and I traveled to watch my stepsister in some games. We’d end up at a place called “the kitchen,” huddled around an actual kitchen of the place while friends and family piled in and cooked turtle soup and gumbo. They were playing Irish folk songs and passing around a bottle of Red Breast 12 year. I will always remember that: music, dance, cooking, and drinking. Toasting to every sip and every song. If that’s not a tradition, it should be.
—Charlie Rausch, bartender, the Vault (Fayetteville)
Prohibition did a number on Arkansas, but that didn’t stop an ambitious real estate developer from opening Wonderland Cave, near the Ozark Mountains. Bella Vista already had a reputation for being a resort town, but the developer wanted a nightclub that was more international, serving exotic food and illegal liquor to hundreds of attendees at tables and booths surrounding a dance floor—inside an actual cave. Nineteen-thirties Arkansas owned the theme: See no evil, hear no evil. But certainly get your groove on.
Today, there’s no need to hide away the best cocktail venues. Fayetteville boasts a wide variety of cocktail-focused destinations, such as the Vault, an elevated cocktail bar in a former bank worth every penny for its cocktail creativity, Cannibal and Craft (named after a Caribbean beach bar and featuring fresh-ingredient cocktails and live music), and Nomads, an eclectic art-filled bar and restaurant in a converted gas station.
Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, also has a nice diversity of cocktail options. South on Main and Big Orange are great starts, and make sure not to miss Atlas Bar, offering a mix of house originals and a list specializing in Highball cocktails from all over the world.
I walked into Little Rock’s Midtown Billiards on a Thursday night, expecting a quieter evening and maybe the chance to chat up some locals shooting a friendly game of pool. But I walked into a Bottle Toss tournament. Bottle Toss might sound like an elaborate game, but it’s really simple: (1) Take a garbage can and place it in an area where the only thing that can break are beer bottles. (2) Pick another area where you can throw a bottle from a healthy distance. (3) Make sure there are plenty of empty bottles. (4) Have a woman with cigarettes in her vocal cords hold a microphone and shame you while you try throwing an empty bottle from a distance into the garbage. (5) If the bottle goes in and doesn’t break, you get a beer. (6) If it breaks you’re disqualified. (7) If you’re wearing an Old Navy shirt, you get hazed even more.
It was actually a lot of fun to watch.
BAR SNACK
Hope, Arkansas, is not only famous for being Bill Clinton’s birthplace, it is the watermelon capital of the world, holding an annual watermelon festival, and an image on the town’s municipal logo—though in college, Clinton was likely less interested in fruit than in Snakebite cocktails (equal parts lager beer and cider).
ARKANSAS SPIRIT
It took a little while, but the first distillery in Arkansas opened in the Land of Opportunity in 2010, offering tasty bourbons, single-barrel reserves, a healthy mélange of flavored fruit vodkas and liqueurs, and hickory-smoked whiskey. The company practices local sourcing by only using grains grown within 125 miles of the distillery, its single-barrel bourbon was voted the 2015 US Whisky of the Year by Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible, and they have a nice spacious tasting room, featuring whiskey flights, specialty cocktails, and a healthy collection of vinyl records.
Americans are a funny lot. They drink whiskey to keep warm; then they put some ice in to make it cool. They put sugar in to make it sweet; and then they put a slice of lemon in it to make it sour. Then they say, “Here’s to you,” and drink it themselves.
—India’s ambassador to the United States, B. N. Chakravarty
ARKANSAS’S OLDEST BAR
Just staring at the beautiful mahogany back bar (hand-carved in the 1800s) can make you feel like you’re stepping back in time. The Ohio Club opened as a nightclub and casino around the turn of the twentieth century, and Prohibition thwarted its popularity only for a moment, as the owners turned some of the space into a cigar shop while operating a speakeasy in another part of the space, attracting local “tourists” such as Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. Even though anti-gambling laws went into effect in 1913, the Ohio Club kept up its gambling game defiantly through 1967, because that’s what outlaws do. As the bar’s website reflects: It’s “the best night in town.”
BAR SNACK
The Little Rock Nine changed history in 1957 by walking into an all-white high school after Brown v. Board of Education deemed segregation unconstitutional, a major victory for civil rights, influencing the world enough that Paul McCartney was inspired to write “Blackbird” in honor of desegregation.
ARKANSAS BUCKET LIST BAR
Maxine’s has been a Fayetteville institution for over six decades, known for its business-savvy, take-no-guff matriarch Maxine Miller, who opened the bar at twenty-four years old in 1950 after borrowing money from her parents. Maxine unfortunately passed away in 2006, but the new owners brought some modern-day cocktail prowess to the vintage décor and added a beautiful copper bar. There’s even a Maxine cocktail, made with gin, blood orange juice, and rosemary syrup, though Maxine preferred Dr Pepper and coffee with salt. Speaking of salt, many memories linger over the years, but none more touching than the spirit of the old days, when sweetheart Maxine would deliver her farewell message for last call by micro-phone: “You have ten minutes to drink up and get the hell out.”
ARKANSAS COCKTAIL BAR
When you sit at the 109 bar, there are a series of elevated wooden coasters with little bots of charred wood aligning the bar top. Each cocktail on the 109 menu gives the drinker the option of smoked wood for the glass—applewood, whiskey barrel oak, hickory, mesquite, or alder. A signature cocktail is the El Verano (“summer”), which, the menu says, “will be the best Margarita you will ever try.” And it tasted like the sun shining on my face!
STATE FACT
Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland, and wrote the song “Five Feet High and Rising” after the 1937 flood in Dyess Colony evacuated everyone in town.
EVERYONE’S IRISH TONIGHT
Art’s Place in Fayetteville is great. Cheap booze, cheap food, pool tables, old MGD signs, jukebox, sports, free peanuts. Honestly a damn good burger as well.
—Charlie Rausch, bartender, the Vault (Fayetteville)
This is a take on Irish Coffee, and the name pays homage to The Boondock Saints, a cult favorite movie of many bartenders I have known over the years, and “Catch you on the flip side” is one of the many quotes you can entertain from the movie. The drink is intended to be a simple riff on the classic, but low ABV. It’s a fine tipple on your way to Tipperary or wherever else the wind be takin’ ye.
1 ounce Tullamore D.E.W. blended Irish whiskey (for the soft vanilla and black currant notes)
¾ ounce cold brew coffee (store-bought, or see this page for homemade concentrate recipe)
½ ounce simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water)
4 dashes Bittercube Corazón bitters (a nice balance of cocoa nibs, cinnamon, and chile)
1 pinch of salt (to wake everything up)
2 ounces heavy cream
Sambuca in an atomizer (optional)
Stir the whiskey, cold brew, syrup, bitters, and salt with ice until chilled; strain into a chilled coupe glass. Shake the cream in a sealed shaker without ice for a good 30 seconds to thicken it. Very slowly top the drink with the cream so it rests on the top.
If desired, spray Sambuca three times over the drink, and if you’re really adventurous, light a wooden match and hold it between the cocktail and the Sambuca, then point the Sambuca atomizer toward the cocktail and over the flame, which will spray the top of the cocktail with flickering flames, leaving a delicate aroma of burned sugar and anise on top.
WINTER IS COMING
I popped in Rock Town on a Thursday in February and asked Christian, the bartender, to make me something from the Rock Town catalogue. He wheeled out this remarkable cocktail, a spice-forward celebration of bourbon, bitters, and all things Game of Thrones. It was exactly what I needed. Added to that sorcery: “This is the second cocktail I have ever created,” Christian told me. Born and raised in Little Rock. Hometown hero. Bar steward. Slayer of White Walkers.
2 ounces Rock Town Single Barrel bourbon
½ ounce Campari
¼ ounce St. Elizabeth allspice dram
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Garnish: lemon peel
Stir the ingredients with ice until chilled; strain into a chilled cocktail glass and serve up. Garnish with the lemon.