Hunting for hidden bars
Houston’s secret speakeasies shake and stir the soul
Houston’s secret Prohibition-era-style speakeasies shake and stir the soul.
The door that leads to Bad News Bar is as nondescript as they come — brown wood, bronze frame, with a black tinted window displaying the words “Ira Aghai, Attorney at Law.” It’s one of the doors you’d assume would be locked shut after 5 p.m. That is, unless you notice the bouncer standing just outside, checking IDs and letting people in.
Walk through this door and you’re greeted by a narrow staircase. If you go all the way up and pull on the metal handle in the shape of a fox, you discover it: Captain Foxheart’s Bad News Bar & Spirit Lodge.
Despite its unassuming entrance, to call Bad News Bar a discovery is a stretch. Located on one of the busiest strips in Houston, at 308 Main, this bar is neither a secret nor underrated. Lit mostly by miniature chandeliers
and traditional bankers’ desk lamps, the bar is typically filled with downtown Houston types — lawyers, engineers, sales people, all dressed the same as they were six hours prior, when they were walking back to work holding a bag of Chipotle.
But Bad News Bar is Houston’s take on a trend of Prohibitionstyle speakeasies that started as early as 1999, when bartender Sasha Petraske opened Milk & Honey in New York’s Soho neighborhood. Milk & Honey was a revelation then. You needed a password to get in. The bartenders had suspenders and mustaches. The cocktails were fancy and expensive, with ingredients such as orgeat, Aperol and orange blossom. As a members-only establishment, Milk & Honey showed that secrecy as a business model, if done right, wasn’t as counterintuitive as it appeared.
No one could portend that, in the next 20 years, the speakeasy aesthetic would blossom out of SoHo, out of New York, out of even the coastal cities and into nearly every major metro in America. Captain Foxheart’s Bad News Bar & Spirit Lodge, as it stands, is one of three “hidden” Houston bars I visited to get to the bottom of their appeal. I wanted to see why a business — an establishment whose purpose is to make money — would want to willingly hide itself from potential customers. And, more important, what makes these hidden bars worth seeking out.
The menu at Bad News Bar is expansive but well edited, with an assemblage of creations that appeal to a variety of tastes. After telling my bartender I don’t drink sweet cocktails, she makes me a Turtle Neck ($12), described on the menu as “if a Rusty Nail and a Manhattan had an inexplicably beautiful baby.” The phrasing isn’t far off. It’s a scotch-brandy drink whose key ingredient, the bartender tells me, is Pineau des Charentes — a French aperitif with a fruit-adjacent sweetness that blends smoothly with the scotch.
Pulling my eyes closer to the menu — which, in the lighting, looks dark-dark-orange — I land on the first item. The Old Fashioned. The first time I ordered it in 2013 in Indiana, my bartender told me, “You watch too much ‘Mad Men’ ” and promptly butchered my drink. Yet today, it appears nearly every bartender in America has a take on the Old Fashioned. It has become the hamburger of cocktails — a staple and a litmus test for the quality of the general establishment.
I have two bargoing accomplices. Our mission is to visit each hidden bar we know of in Houston and to ponder the appeal of secrecy in the era of social media. Our next stop is close by at the Tongue-Cut Sparrow, also located via a hidden entrance that leads to a stairwell, this time from within the mezcal bar The Pastry War. Tongue-Cut Sparrow’s vibe is distinct and refined. The servers wear bow ties. They hand you hot towels before your drinks, English peas (served on floral, blue-and-white Japanesestyle porcelain dishes) during your drinks and hard candies afterward. The Old-Fashionedadjacent creation, the Fancy Free ($14), is delectable, with a spicy bourbon offset by eau de vie brandy, vermouth and bitters.
When I messaged owner Bobby Heugel about this story, he makes sure to distance his establishment from the speakeasy label. “We aren’t inspired by bars from the Prohibition Era and don’t like the term ‘speakeasy’ to describe our bar,” he writes. “We’re inspired by small cocktail dens in Tokyo (which largely emerged after World War II) and formal European hotel bars.”
I can imagine, from the perspective of a bar owner, how it feels to be lumped with other Houston bars in a “trend piece.” Trendifying an establishment is like throwing a fine whiskey, with its own distinct flavor profile, into a can of Pepsi. And yet here we are, the three of us, closing out our tab at Tongue-Cut Sparrow
and heading toward a door tucked under a staircase in a River Oaks parking lot, about to order another Old Fashioned.
Marfreless, our final stop, is perhaps the perfect symbol of the aspirational class of millennials. We always want the best bahn mi, the best happy hour. We like concerts where it’s hard to get tickets, parties that are invite-only, bands with small followings — we “killed” Applebee’s because we’re obsessed with feeling special. And so, of course we’re drawn to places like these, places that feel secret, even if such secrecy is manufactured. Marfreless’ bartender says he doesn’t like cocktails, so we end the night with a special request of the peetiest scotch on the shelf, aged 10 years, Ardberg.
As the night ends, I pick up our tab. Gawking at it, I’m reminded why I typically frequent dives such as Khon’s, PJ’s or D&W Lounge. The journey to explore Houston’s hidden bars, it turns out, isn’t so much an adventure as it is yet another act of brandoriented consumerism — that contains, nonetheless, a tinge of romanticism from a bygone era.
After all, it was a romantic fling two summers ago that brought me first to Marfreless, then to Bad News Bar and Tongue-Cut Sparrow. For me, Houston’s secret bars will always be blended (and shaken and stirred) with the idea of an intimate encounter. Trend or not, I love how a classy backroom establishment with dim lights and well-made mixed drinks can infuse a night with mystery and class.