Red Ribbon Society

There is a door at the bottom of the stairs marked A. Williams, Ribbon Supply, with an arrow pointing toward a personnel office. It is set dressing, built into what used to be the boiler room under The Flat Iron Hotel at 20 Battery Park Avenue. The pipes that once carried the building’s heat still run the ceiling of the red-lit hallway leading to that door, and the stairs down are laid in black-and-white geometric tile. The Indigo Road, which also runs the hotel above it, operates the room: red velvet barstools on brass legs, three arched and backlit wood nooks stacked with glassware behind the bar, a wire-mesh chandelier over the counter. Seven cocktails, sixteen to seventeen dollars. A Boulevardier and a Negroni built as the Luminosa sit next to originals: the Siesta splits mezcal and blanco tequila with grapefruit and lime, and the Forager Martini pours Chemist Forager’s Gin over a preserved ramp with Botanist and Barrel’s “one for the fishes.” Chemist Spirits, a downtown Asheville gin distillery, made that gin with Red Ribbon Society for a debut poured here one Thursday in October. One of the bartenders, Lando Sprinkle, told Garden & Gun that a single large cube “is the way to enjoy a single spirit in its purest form, if you want to mellow out its sharper notes” — a lot of conviction about ice, and the drink does stay cold longer for it. Order the Forager Martini if the preserved ramp is still in it; that gin was made for this room, and it is the one drink here that exists nowhere else.