Sovereign Remedies

Parker Reid gutted the 800-square-foot corner unit at Walnut and Market to the studs in 2014. He rebuilt it on a single idea. Reid told a reporter what he was after. “Greenhouses really have this inherent beauty in that they were engineered to produce a specific product, and we want the bar to feel the same way, like it was engineered to produce cocktails.” Zinc counters, Brazilian walnut tables and ironwork by Tina Councell of Iron Maiden Studios followed. None of it looks rented. He got what he described, too: plants crowd the arched windows in the corner nooks, and the pendants hang low enough over the bar that each table keeps to itself. Charlie Hodge, who had helped open Chestnut and built its beverage program before organizing the Portland Bartenders Guild, opened the finished room. He had guessed beforehand that the build would take “anywhere from two to 14 months” — the kind of estimate anyone who has waited on a contractor will recognize.

In July 2018, the whole kitchen relocated for one night to the James Beard House in Greenwich Village. About seventy-five guests paid $175 a head for a dinner called Modern Appalachia. Chef Graham House sent fried squash blossoms, chicken skins in chile honey and sumac, 22-month-aged prosciutto. Hodge and House rented a truck and drove the ingredients north themselves rather than trust a freight line with them. The Beard Foundation’s stipend covered only part of the cost, so Hodge paid the rest out of a downtown cocktail bar’s margins.

None of that shows up on the drink names. Vera McCurry is a martini built on house-made blue cheese vodka and the bar’s own brined olives — savory enough to argue with. The Root Daiquiri trades citrus for sarsaparilla, dandelion root and burdock, tasting more like a tonic than a cocktail — appropriate, for a bar named after remedies. Taco Tuesday puts Lalo tequila up against an al pastor–brined tomato and onion, a joke of a name over a serious build.

The same room trucked its own squash blossoms to Manhattan for a formal dinner. The menu still likes a joke.