The Roof At The Radical

The building went up for Fred Kent to run a grocery distributorship out of, and by the time anyone thought about putting a bar on top of it, it had been a fire ruin, the city’s designated nuclear fallout shelter, and then nothing at all for long enough that graffiti writers took the inside apart and made it theirs. The restoration finished in 2023. The roof opened above all of that, and then Helene arrived and shut it; it came back on the twenty-first of March 2025.

It is the only rooftop bar in Asheville that is not downtown. That single fact changes what you see from it — the French Broad rather than a grid of streets, and the Blue Ridge behind the river rather than over the shoulder of a hotel four blocks away. The room is open-air and runs with the season.

Thirteen drinks, nine to seventeen dollars. Both an Old Fashioned and a Negroni come out of a barrel. The house signature is called Roof Is On Fire — tequila, mango, passionfruit, lime and firewater — and further down the list, poured on top of a building that spent its first life full of cereal grain, there is one called Oops! All Berries. Melon Dramatic and Orangechu Happy Now are on the same page, so the naming is a house style rather than an accident.

Go up before the light goes. The river is the reason you came and it is the first thing the evening takes away.