How Raleigh’s Bartenders Built the City’s Bar Culture

Photography by Sean Junqueira

When a Bar Was Just a Bar

For a sud-soaked stretch in the mid-aughts, a great bar didn’t need a reason to exist beyond being a great bar. Bars were what bars had always been. “You didn’t go there for the drinks,” muses William & Company’s Lily Ballance. “Well, sometimes.” But more significantly, she remembers, you just went where your friends were. To be together.

In 2009, down a set of concrete stairs in DTR and past an ominous red neon sign, an edgy, whiskey-soaked, exposed-brick haven laid the Foundation (pun fully intended) for a DTR cocktail revolution when it poured its first dram. 

Two years later on Glenwood South, classic jazz got the Bram Stoker treatment at C. Grace—in the best way—rewriting the local bar scene from behind its red curtains. And a year later on a sleepy side street on DTR’s southern edge, Ashley Christensen took the cocktail movement underground again with Fox Liquor Bar.

Call it Raleigh’s golden bar era. You could tuck away at Havana Deluxe in a fever dream of cigarette smoke, politicians and underground secrets; catch up with friends while trying to down enough beers to earn a plate on the wall at Flying Saucer; or simply show up somewhere to blow off steam, hang out or hide for a while. A friendly bartender could be your therapist—or the only person you purposefully spoke to that day. And behind those bars, Raleigh’s next generation was learning how to create exactly that.

Then They Inherited the Bar

It was an education earned one barstool, one cocktail and one shift at a time—barbacking together, sharing mentors and after-shift drinks (and later regulars), schooling and challenging each other and, eventually, training the next generation. Rinse, wash, repeat.

“At its best, this is an industry that’s always been built on mentorship,” says Mr. Henry’s Matt Bettinger at an RM roundtable with this year’s 10 Bartender of the Year nominees, all owners of some of the city’s best bars. But getting schooled didn’t end at last call. On nights off, they drank at one another’s bars, passed around the same $20—and sometimes showed up with a mystery ingredient from Taz’s and a simple challenge for whoever was behind the stick: Make me something. 

That’s how Raleigh’s bar DNA replicated. In a scene small enough that everybody seemed to know everybody, competition took a back seat to community. Back then, in a far less saturated market, “the cream just rose,” says Peyote Mini-Bar’s Marshall Davis. But those great bars produced great teams, and eventually “everyone got hired up to open up their own bar. And now you’ve got this web.”

You see their past in the blueprint. Kevin Barrett took the best pieces of Foundation, C. Grace and Fox Liquor Bar and rolled them into Dram & Draught, literally opening the garage door on his own version of a neighborhood bar. 

Matt Coleman envisioned The Davie as something permanent—a “home” not only for guests, but for the career bartenders who spend every night creating one for them. Bittersweet’s Lewis Norton, who grew up on Cheers before finding his footing at Foundation, has spent the last dozen years building his own versions of the place where everybody knows your name. And what Ballance built with Willco goes far deeper than the bottom of the bottle: Art, culture and community grew up around it, nods Tap Yard’s Zack Medford.

Different bars. Same fundamental proposition: Come in, sit down, belong somewhere. The bartender’s job hasn’t fundamentally changed—owning the room around that bartender has. 

Keeping a Bar

And just as this generation began building their own bars, the system that raised them broke.

Welcome to March 2020. The pandemic wasn’t just another hurdle—it was the rupture. These spirit savants spent 15 to 20 years learning how to make a room people wanted to inhabit—and suddenly the room itself became the liability.

Going out suddenly felt criminal—and bars were singled out. As restaurants began reopening at limited capacity that May, standalone bars remained shuttered, sparking a monthslong fight for survival—and helping spawn the NC Bar and Tavern Association. For operators like Medford, there was “no light at the end of the tunnel.” Unable to keep carrying full rent on closed Fayetteville
Street bars, he and his partners eventually sold Isaac Hunter’s and Parliament and shuttered Coglin’s.

But the pandemic didn’t only threaten the bars they’d built. Hospitality workers left the industry in droves—and many never came back. Those who remained got promoted fast, while the next crop of barbacks and young bartenders missed years of the side-by-side training that had raised the generation before them.

“Post COVID, there are a lot more people who are here because they have to be,” says Barrett. “They come at entry-level, they leave entry-level. They never learn a thing or grow—or really fall in love.” The industry basically lost a four-year period where that didn’t continue, adds Bettinger.

Because bartending had always been learned just as much after the shift as during it. The bartender who busted a barback’s balls through service might take them out for beers afterward, introduce them to the person working the next bar—and start the cycle all over again. That’s how people learned not only to bartend but, as Bettinger puts it, “how to be a good bar guest, be a regular—socialize.”

Meet the Bartenders

The Great Bar Undoing

The pandemic didn’t kill drinking. But bars reopened into a culture that increasingly drinks—and socializes—differently.

Now, drinking has hit a near-century rock bottom, especially among younger generations, and the old-school night out competes with everything from mocktails and THC alts to an endless roster of things to do instead—run clubs, mahjong, craft nights, book clubs.

You can see the shift from the barstool. When this generation was on the comeup, “we had Megatouches on the bar top,” Medford remembers, noting now everyone has a phone in their pocket, Netflix on the TV and seemingly endless reasons to stay home. “It’s that much harder to pull them out of their house and put them onto a barstool.”

Plenty of people still want a bar to be their neighborhood gathering place. But that slice of the pie “seems to get smaller every year,” he adds. And so, increasingly, a bar needs a reason, the bar owners all agree.

Call it the great eventification, requiring anything from trivia, BYO craft night, theme nights, pop-ups, events and programming, Instagrammable moments—whatever might break through the scroll and get someone off the couch.

Which means today’s neighborhood bar owner isn’t just hosting a party—they’re playing youth group leader or camp counselor. Keeping the calendar full has become its own job—one that would have seemed almost foreign to a generation that remembers when drinking was fun, recalls Foundation’s Kyle Hankin. “That was the thing.”

“We’re all just doing what we can do to get people in the door,” adds Killjoy’s Josh Gagne. “It’s almost survival in a sense. It’s changed so much from when we were bartenders and you opened the doors, and they just came.”

But programming presents its own paradox. An event can get someone through the door while inadvertently teaching them that the event—not the bar—is the reason to return. Bettinger wonders whether someone who discovers a bar during live music simply thinks, I’ll come back next time they have music, asking: “Does that dilute your core concept?”

And getting people through the door is only half the battle. Keeping the doors open has become exponentially more costly. “Everything is so expensive,” says Gussie’s Katie O’Kane, prompting immediate agreement. But even that familiar refrain has acquired an absurd new wrinkle: The equipment costs more—and, according to several owners, lasts far less.

At Foundation, Hankin recently spent $23,000 replacing an HVAC unit that had lasted 15 years. The installers’ prognosis for its far pricier replacement? About eight. Across the table came similar stories of refrigeration systems, frozen-drink machines, dishwashers and, hilariously and apparently universally, ice machines arriving faulty, failing early or sitting useless while operators waited weeks for parts. 

Add a laundry list of growing pains: diminished distributor support, parking and infrastructure headaches, regulation—and responsibilities that never used to belong anywhere near a bartender. Norton sees it in his best staff, who are “exhausted” by tasks that never used to be part of the job—from enforcing public-health rules during COVID to being trained to administer Narcan in the event of an overdose. “Why is that a bartender’s job?” he adds.

The modern bar owner, in other words, can start to sound less like someone throwing a party than someone perpetually trying to keep the building—and everyone inside it—from falling apart. Which raises the question: Can a bar still just be a bar?

Can a Bar Just Be a Bar?

“Got to hope so,” says Bettinger. “I’m banking on it.” And around the table, heads nod.

Turns out, the answer is unanimous: Yes. Everything around the bar may have changed. The reason for one hasn’t. People still want somewhere to go after work or on a weekend, somewhere they might run into an old friend—or make a new one—without first arranging it in a group chat.

“I think people appreciate a third place as much as ever,” says Bettinger. “I do think how we get them out is … the constant conversation.”

And there are signs the uncomplicated night out may be making a comeback. Several owners are seeing 21- to 23-year-olds checking out bars just to be in bars—and the 35+ crowd emerging from young-kids-at-home years with a renewed appreciation for going out. “It’s reenergizing,” says Gagne. “It feels like, oh, this is kind of coming back.”

So the bar, it turns out, still works. Getting people there is the hard part. So why keep fighting so hard for it? “I think a lot of us in this room all just love taking care of people,” says Coleman, as the owners emphatically nod along. 

And there it is. For all the obsession over spirits, technique and the perfect pour, what keeps pulling this group behind the stick isn’t really the drinking after all.

Raise a Glass

Because what makes a great bar matter has never really been what’s in the glass. It’s the people.

Think Cheers or How I Met Your Mother or Friends: You don’t necessarily call everyone and make a plan. You just go—and run into each other. “It really is that third place that people need,” says Medford. A meeting place where you might see an old friend, make a new one or meet the person who eventually becomes your significant other.

And over enough nights, life starts happening around the barstools. They’ve watched first dates become marriages, poured drinks after people have passed away. Foundation and Bittersweet even share a pair of regulars who turned both bars into part of their engagement story: One proposed at Foundation, then the other returned the favor at Bittersweet, shares Hankin. “I’ve seen people go to bars to do everything and anything.”

It’s where you go on your worst day and your best day—both “can exist in the same bar at the same time,” says O’Kane. “Which is the best part.”

Because eventually a bar becomes your bar. That’s it—it’s your bar. It’s where you feel most comfortable. Turns out, the same is true on the other side of the stick.

Need ice? Another bar will let you drain what you need from its machine. Basil? Somebody has it. A repair person? They’ll share the number. “None of us have ever seen each other’s bars as competition,” says Norton. “It’s family.”

The interconnected community that raised this generation never really went away. Maybe that’s how you keep a bar after all. You build a place where people take care of one another. And when keeping that place alive gets harder than you ever imagined, you let those people take care of you too.