The 9 Best Speakeasies in Asheville

Once you are through, nothing further is asked. The bar’s own FAQ answers the question people arrive with: no password, no reservation, first come and first served. A cover appears only when somebody is playing, and the house keeps none of it — all of it reaches the performers.

Behind the blank door is a room that has been collecting since 2014. An ornate carved cabinet holds part of a list the bar puts at more than eight hundred whiskeys. A piano stands in the seating area, which is where they screened Nosferatu to a live score. Dogs are welcome. Arrive without a plan.

Directions

Past the gate the visit splits in two. The courtyard costs nothing — you sit outside with a drink and nobody takes a ticket at any point. The basement listening room does take one, ten dollars midweek and fifteen at the weekend, and it is the reason the place was built.

The space was Pete’s Pies before it was any of this. Mr. Jimmy, a Chicago musician, hosts the Sunday session out in the courtyard, free and without an RSVP. Go to that one first. It costs nothing to learn whether the room is for you.

Directions

You go in through the taproom on Hilliard and keep walking. The route passes fermentation tanks and barrels toward the rear of the building, where a black carpet ends at a door with nothing written on it. You let yourself in. Neon and palm fronds begin on the other side.

The twenty-five hundred square feet back there had never been open to the public before 2023. Nobody stops you, nobody asks for anything, and the secrecy reads closer to a joke the brewery is in on than a rule. Walk to the back as though you have done it before.

Directions

The treads are dished in the middle, worn there by a century of people who came to this building to work. That century is the whole of the point. The Flat Iron went up in 1926 and spent almost all of its life as offices, and the bar occupies the boiler room that heated them.

At the bottom, a red corridor runs beneath the original overhead pipework to a door lettered for a ribbon supply company that never traded here. Past it the room turns velvet and brass: stools on brass legs, arched backlit nooks stacked with glassware, a wire-mesh chandelier hung over the counter. The list changes often; the descent does not. Go down before you decide.

Directions

The arrow is doing real work, because nothing else at that address suggests a bar underneath it. The sign and the eye-shaped mirror inside were both drawn by Story Blowers; the fretwork came from J-Krush at Shapesmith Studio and the joinery from Tom Gibson at Ironwood Studios.

What the stairs used to lead down to was The Black Cloud, a metal bar under blacklights. Casey Campfield gutted that and rebuilt the room in red oak and Baltic birch, and it now seats about forty around a shuffleboard table. Take the arrow literally.

Directions

The room below has exposed brick with a world map painted across it, and the list is filed by technique rather than by ingredient: clarified, infused, smoked, barrel aged, carbonated, foamy. Staff picks at the time of writing were Summer Empress, Tomatini and Black & Blue.

Upstairs, until January 2025, was Dilbar, an Indian street-food restaurant that shut without warning; the owners here took that space as well. The specialty list turns over every quarter, so read any name above as this season’s. The word over the door is said the way you would say pharmacy, which is the only hint the street gives you about what the list is doing. Ask what came off it last.

Directions

Nothing about the way down is theatrical, and nobody has ever bothered to write it down. What is documented is what it cost: the room was built in 2009 as part of a five-hundred-thousand dollar expansion, drawn up by Douglas Maderis, and it has been a bourbon bar ever since.

Justin Ferraby opened it and still works behind the counter. There are more than five hundred and fifty bourbons, a Rock-Ola jukebox beneath a wall of disco balls, and a vinyl station stocked by Harvest Records. The show overhead arrives on a live feed. Come down between sets.

Directions

The bar you cross first runs the full length of its room, booths down one wall and a small floor for dancing at the end of it. Strange Magic is what lies past that, and there is a cover at the back — six dollars, the last time anybody wrote the number down.

It holds no address of its own and claims no separate street door; its Instagram bio gives its location as the back of the other bar and stops there. What it does have is a caption it uses often, and the caption is DANCING ROOM ONLY. Take that as the warning it plainly is.

Directions

The pair were a single-storey auto repair shop until 2015, when Legerton Architecture cut them apart and set the courtyard between. From inside the bar you can see the stillhouse through glass — four hand-hammered copper stills, working, not staged for the room. They are the reason the bar exists in the shape it does.

That is the whole conceit and it happens to be a true one: a Prohibition apothecary with an actual distillery behind it rather than a theme. Debbie Word learned the still herself and the bar opened around it in 2018. Sit somewhere you can see the copper from.

Directions