Capella on 9

Peter Pollay, the chef-owner of Posana, helped shape the concept behind Capella on 9. McKibbon Hospitality owns the room, and Mandara Hospitality Group handled the food-and-beverage consulting behind it. Rakim Gaines runs the kitchen now, on the ninth floor at 10 Broadway, where the same room does breakfast before it does cocktails. The cocktail list holds fifteen drinks — twelve signature builds priced $14 to $17, three more on tap for $10 to $15: La Diabla Dulce (Corazón reposado, a blackberry-cayenne shrub, fee foam), Lady Lava Lamp (Corazón blanco, cachaça, coconut cream, hibiscus tea), Petal and Pearl (Ketel One, pisco, lychee). One signature pour, the Smoked Bourbon, skips mixing altogether: Old Forrester’s four-year bottling, poured over smoke and nothing else. The tap list runs three ways instead — Some Kind of Mule, which pours Wheatley vodka, Old Forester bourbon and El Jimador tequila into the same glass of ginger beer, a summer sangria, and a plain hibiscus tea with no alcohol in it at all. Some of the kitchen’s ingredients still travel in from Spain, landing next to whatever produce is local that week, a habit left over from Pollay’s original build. Some Thursday evenings the room turns into a small gallery for a couple of hours — most recently painter Spencer Beals, work up on the walls, cocktail in hand, before the night resumes as usual. It is an odd thing to find nine floors above a hotel lobby, and it keeps happening anyway. Go up on a Thursday if the artist calendar lines up; otherwise reserve ahead for a dinner table.