Up the stairs past the taproom, thirty seats and cocktails only.
Above a beer hall built for noise, this room posts a rule against it. The taproom fills the ground floor with Belgian ales. Delirium Bar keeps the basement. Top of the Monk takes the roof — cocktails only, thirty seats. Its own house rule: no parties of seven or more after seven on Friday or Saturday. Feather boas and noisemakers get checked at the door — the room already seems to know what climbs those stairs on a Friday night.
Up on the deck, wine barrels stand in as tables, ringed by mauve metal stools. String lights stretch pole to parapet, red brick close enough to touch. The rail looks out over downtown Asheville’s rooftops toward the mountains. It’s a sunset view over South Slope that the 2021 renovation was built to widen. The same renovation refinished the original wood floor, already more than a century old, after the building sat closed for fifteen months. Kala Brooks built the cocktail program here for years before she was promoted to general manager of all three of Thirsty Monk’s bars. Chall Gray was Thirsty Monk’s VP then, and later the man behind Little Jumbo and Character Study. He was saying so publicly by 2015. “Kala has been really pushing the envelope, and the drinks at Top of the Monk recently have been some of the best anywhere on the east coast.” “I love the energy in the Top of the Monk,” Thirsty Monk’s CEO Barry Bialik told the Biltmore Beacon. “It’s more intimate.”
The list splits the same way the room does: half modern cocktails, half pre-Prohibition builds, both sides built around history. The Sexy Old Fashioned takes the older half — Woodford Double Oaked and High West Double Rye, a house-cured allspice dram, Benedictine, barrel-aged cherry bitters. The Blood Orange New Fashioned takes the newer one, Ramazzotti amaro and blood orange caramel worked into over-proof bourbon. The bar ferments its own clover honey in miso for the Miso Honey Goldrush, then builds it on Toki whisky and oolong tea. Only the Lemon Tarragon Flip crosses back downstairs, finished with Thirsty Monk’s own Abbey Blonde ale.
Climb past the taproom for quiet, not beer.
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Part of Asheville's speakeasies rooftop bars
Events
Saturday 24 October · 1
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Themed dinner
Amelie, A New Orleans Cafe pops up at Top of the Monk with red beans and rice, gumbo, and mushrooms on toast, alongside handcrafted fall cocktails.
Every night Top of the Monk lists, in your calendar.
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