The 12 Best Rooftop Bars in Asheville

The terrace faces west off the eighth floor and the hotel underneath it has changed flags since 2016 without the view noticing. What has survived from the opening list is the Montford Mule, and it is not the same drink: it began on Covington vodka, Amaro Montenegro, black tea and sorghum, and it now runs on Cultivated Vodka, a spiced honey liqueur and a ginger beer made across town.

That is a fair description of the whole room. The ridge does the work and the bar keeps quietly rewriting itself underneath it. Go up the outside lift and turn right at the top.

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There are two terraces up here, not one, and between them heaters, fire pits and a fireplace sealed behind glass — which tells you the room is built to be used in weather that would empty the others.

What is underneath is the surprise. The block held a 351-space parking deck for forty-eight years before any of this, so this is the one room in the set that is not a conversion of something with character; it is new, and it is honest about that. Order one of the two gin and tonics. They are the house argument and have been for years.

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Eighteen hundred and fifty square feet, about a hundred and twenty seats, on top of a building that was offices for most of a century. The roof has two lives and only one name gets used: it is The Rooftop Caffé while the light is flat and The Flat Iron Rooftop once it is not.

Worth knowing before you climb, because the room you picture is the second one. The bar downstairs is in the boiler room; this is the same building read from the other end. Do both in one night and the century makes more sense than either does alone.

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Downtown roofs give you a grid with a ridge behind it. This one gives you the French Broad running past, the warehouses of the arts district on both banks, and the mountains set back behind all of it — a landscape rather than a skyline, which is a genuinely different evening.

A hundred and twenty-five people fit, and the room is open to the weather, so it keeps to the season and closes with it. Both the Old Fashioned and the Negroni come out of a barrel, which is not what a hotel roof usually does with its shoulder season. Come while the light is still on the water.

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The mountains are there to the west, but they are not what the room is pointed at. What it is pointed at is the square, and a park is a better thing to watch than a ridge is, because a park keeps changing while you are looking at it.

Three of the floors underneath you did not exist until recently — they were added on top of a 1970s bank to make the hotel. So the height is borrowed and the view is downward, which is an odd combination and the reason this one reads differently from the hotel roofs west of here. Take the lift and keep going up.

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You get in through an elevator door on Patton and then climb, which is a strange sequence and the only one on offer. The patio faces south and west, so the sun goes down over the South Slope and the breweries rather than over anything scenic, and that is somehow better.

It is the smallest room on this page by a distance, and the domestic proportions are not a design decision — somebody used to live here, and the walls still know it. Below you sit a head shop and a hookah bar, stacked into a building that predates every hotel on this list by about a century. Thirty seats means you go early or you do not go at all.

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Six floors up, with a living wall built around a neon sign and a fire pit that earns its keep in the shoulder months. What you look at is the skyline with the Blue Ridge set behind it, and the fact that the whole block went up at once in 2016 as one of three buildings raised together.

Justin Picone runs the drinks. Three of the ten on the January list arrive under luster dust and one has spent a fortnight in a cask upstairs, which is more effort than a hotel roof usually bothers with. Ask which one came out of the barrel this week.

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The apothecary look downstairs is a build, not a survival — the whole thing went up on what had been a repair shop’s car park, so the century it appears to have is entirely manufactured. The terrace is the part that is straightforwardly what it looks like: pots, a bar, some chairs, and the South Slope going about its evening below.

Sources disagree about which floor it is on, so pick your own number when you get there. What matters is that the gin in your glass was distilled about thirty feet away, which is not true of anywhere else on this list. Ask them to pick the herb.

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Tim Gormley co-founded Burial, makes the ciders here and started the aperitif list; the grape wine is somebody else’s work entirely, made by Evan Lewandowski out in Geyserville and shipped back. That division is unusual enough to be the reason to come.

What sits above the music hall, then, is a cider maker’s roof carrying a serious wine list, on a brewery campus built partly out of a hardware shop’s old building on Buxton Avenue. The height is incidental and the room knows it: nothing here is arranged to point you at a view, and the list is arranged very carefully indeed. Order the thing you cannot get downstairs.

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Forty-four seats, covered, heated through the winter, with roll-up doors and fans for the months that need them. It opened in 2012 in a space that had been Sazerac, and it has called itself Asheville’s original rooftop ever since — a claim that traces back only to the bar, so take it as pride rather than record.

The kitchen underneath is Strada’s and the list comes off the same page. The one drink built on named neighbours is the Local’s Negroni: Chemist gin, Eda Rhyne’s Bitter Tooth, Dolin. Sit at the rail and watch Broadway instead of the sky.

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A hundred and fifty-two seats, three gas fire pits with one of them indoors, a two-sided fireplace, and a hundred-and-twenty-gallon copper still standing at the entrance so you know what the room thinks it is. The robata carries a thousand-degree fire, and it is close enough to the glass that you feel it on the near side.

The list has a point of view most hotel roofs do not bother with — shiso-infused gin under sparkling sake, umeboshi shochu with gochujang agave, and three cocktails poured off nitro taps. West-facing and unobstructed, which on this page is rarer than it sounds. Sit on the glass side.

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The pizza and the panorama get the attention and the drinks are quietly better than either: three cellos made in house, a margarita built on charred poblano and jalapeño agave, a sour that takes its colour from butterfly pea. There is a full zero-proof list beside them, which is rarer up here than it should be.

What stood here before was the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, demolished on permits pulled in 2018 for a hotel the council had voted to deny. Two hundred and forty degrees of terrace on top of that. Bring a coin for the binoculars.

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