The Great Hall Bar

The Great Hall Bar has no room to itself: it’s the far end of the Grove Park Inn’s lobby, the end with the fireplace built to burn twelve-foot logs. E.W. Grove was a pharmacist from St. Louis who came to Asheville chasing relief from insomnia and bronchitis, then decided to build a resort instead of leaving. Four hundred laborers and twenty Italian stonemasons raised the inn in under a year, cutting granite off his own land on the shoulder of Sunset Mountain, and it opened on July 12, 1913, with William Jennings Bryan delivering the remarks. The lobby they built still runs a hundred and twenty feet long by eighty feet wide, with a matching fireplace at either end — the original amenities included a movie screen right there in the Great Hall, strung between the two hearths. Grove’s son-in-law, Fred L. Seely, set the Arts and Crafts style that still furnishes the room, choosing pieces built plain enough to still be standing a century on. The list holds fifteen drinks across three sections — nine signature cocktails, three sangrias, three liquid desserts — at $15 to $32. Among them: a Whistlepig Maple Old Fashioned rested in the distillery’s own barrels, a Jungle Bird built on Appleton Estate rum and Campari, and a Private Select poured from the inn’s own single-barrel pick of Maker’s Mark. That bourbon is barrel-picked for the hotel alone; you won’t find that pour anywhere else. Come in from the cold and sit as close to the hearth as they’ll let you.