SKY-HIGH DINING
The Rooftop offers service with a view on Foody Friday
Towering over the national park, The Rooftop Bar offers a variety of drinks and food with a fantastic view of downtown Hot Springs below.
Located on top of The Waters Hotel, The Rooftop Bar is a relatively new restaurant inside a classic building.
The restaurant has burgers and nachos on the menu as well as numerous alcoholic drinks with Hot Springs-inspired names such as Old Gangster Fashioned, Roof Top Swizzle, the Spa City Cosmo and one named after former Hot Springs Mayor Leo McLaughlin.
“McLaughlin is a scotch and soda drink,” Robert Zunick, majority owner of The Waters, said. “It’s named after Mayor Leo McLaughlin who ruled the city for many years back in the heyday when there was gambling and the gangsters and kind of a wide-open downtown scene, and he would ride up and down Central Avenue with a horse-drawn carriage that had two horses, one named Scotch and another named Soda.”
The restaurant serves mostly light fare food such as burgers and “the nachos are pretty popular. There’s a great drink menu that we’ve come out with,” Tasha Smith, general manager, said, “We change our drink menu seasonally.”
The bar is limitless, she said. “They’ve got so many options. We’re going to have specialty
drinks this summer like dirty milkshakes. We have some good coffee drinks right now. Just anything you can think of.”
“A selection of beer and fine wine, bourbon, anything, it’s a full bar,” Zunick said.
Both Smith and Zunick said their favorite thing on the menu is the pork nachos. “The pork nachos are amazing,” Smith said.
“They are hard to pass up,” Zunick said, “and the burgers are good, too.”
The Rooftop is the second restaurant to open in The Waters after The Avenue. Smith noted that pre-pandemic, a lot of guests would visit both restaurants when stopping by The Waters.
“It’s predominantly light fare, come up, have a cocktail and then, perhaps, most guests go down to The Avenue to have their dinner,” she said. Due to COVID-19, The Avenue is currently open only for breakfast, but Smith said they intend to expand their hours later this summer.