Crucible

The light comes from one globe pendant, and the room under it is small and dark and washed red. Anna Toth and Brandon Skupski opened Crucible at 140A Roberts Street in the fall of 2016. They are artists, Skupski also builds furniture by hand, and the bar top you lean on is one they built themselves. It is the stage for everything else.

In June 2025 Esquire put Crucible on its Best Bars in America list, in an entry by Stephen Satterfield, who hosts Netflix’s High on the Hog. “The drinks are outstanding,” he wrote, and then he spent his words on the people. The warmth, he said, “does not come from performative corporate hospitality,” and in the part of town Helene hit hardest, the bar has offered “ongoing shelter from the storm.”

That warmth is whoever is behind the bar, and on plenty of nights it is the owners themselves, ten years into their own room. They choose the music and talk you through the list, and a question about a daiquiri can turn into tasting it more than one way.

The list follows the year. They make as much of what they pour as they can, grow some of it and buy the rest from farmers they trust, so originals and lightly adjusted classics come and go with the season. The Barrel Aged Toronto, Wild Turkey rye with fernet, Angostura and demerara rested forty days in the barrel, is a deep-winter drink. A visit in July and a visit in January are different evenings, and the best first move is asking what is good tonight.

None of it is left to chance. The light, the music, the service and the drinks carry the room together, and the objects around it were made by neighbors who are probably at the next table. The building is easy to miss from the street, which is the only hard part. Look alive.