Antidote at Chemist Spirits

Antidote is built around a working still. Debbie Word left a career in landscape architecture in 2016 to teach herself to distill on a family still, alongside her daughter Danielle, who studied chemistry. Two years later, in 2018, they opened Antidote around it. The room takes up three floors in Asheville’s South Slope — a switchback staircase, a chandelier hung off a tin ceiling, dark wood booths under exposed brick. The floor at the door spells it out anyway, ANTIDOTE and the street number 151 set into a black-tile sunburst, as if the rest of the building left any doubt. A garden patio off the side takes leashed dogs, no reservation required, and a full espresso bar and a loose-leaf tea list from Asheville’s own Dobra Tea run the whole day, so the room is a coffee shop for as many hours as it is a bar. Forty-three cocktails are on the current list, built mostly on the house gin, vodka and whiskey, with a few outside names mixed in — the Fernet Daiquiri runs on Eda Rhyne’s Appalachian Fernet, the Pink Panther on her Bittertooth — plus four absinthes poured neat and a short zero-proof list. Bath Bomb pairs vodka with honeysuckle, orris root and a vegan egg-white foam; Venus Fly Trap runs navy-strength gin through a house celery shrub; Saint Basil of Benedictine is whiskey, blueberry and basil. Upstairs, a working fireplace and a clear run at downtown make the rooftop worth the climb, though it’s only partly covered and closes outright when the weather turns.