Category Archives: Fort Worth

Barmoire, Bars, Competitions and Honors, Events, Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Reunited and it feels so good, Tributes

The Usual, North Texas’ pioneering craft cocktail bar, marks 15 years of serving up ‘all manner of slightly esoteric libation’

It’s almost hard to believe there was a time when you couldn’t find a decent Manhattan in Fort Worth, but when I moved to Dallas in 2010, North Texas was still largely a craft cocktail wasteland. Sure, Knox-Henderson restaurant Victor Tangos had gone all-in on what was already a national craft renaissance, and a handful of bartenders hip to the revival were doing crafty things behind the bar at places like Windmill Lounge near Uptown, Bolsa in Bishop Arts and The Mansion at Turtle Creek, but no drink establishments that I could find had yet put craft cocktails front and center.

Eventually, I made my way over to Fort Worth, where I found a bar called The Usual, an unassuming beacon of craft know-how on Magnolia Avenue that on Wednesday will mark its 15th anniversary, making it – by just six months – the second oldest craft-cocktail bar in Texas, a remarkable milestone for a notoriously unforgiving industry in a place that doesn’t always get its due.

The Usual was the genie in the bottle for all the cocktail wishes I’d brought with me from Seattle, where the ongoing renaissance was already in full force. Its office-park exterior belied the sleek and sexy space inside and a level of creativity behind the bar that Fort Worth didn’t yet know it wanted. At the same time, it was welcoming and unpretentious, the vision of Brad Hensarling, who’d been with the nearby Chat Room Pub before making what was then a radical choice – to open a bar focused on craft cocktails – or, as its menu states, “all manner of slightly esoteric libation” – with then-co-owners Jon Carney and Juan Solis.

In Texas, The Usual’s opening was preceded only by Houston’s Anvil, which opened in early 2009.

The mirror adjoining the bar at The Usual offers a glimpse of the cozy environs within. Texas’ second-oldest craft cocktail bar marks its 15th anniversary this week.

“The original architecture, with mirrors on the ceilings of the booths, all the elements of intention of that space are still intact,” says Pam Moncrief, who was among The Usual’s early crew of bartenders and worked there on and off over an eight-year span. “All that wood in there – white American oak, intentionally chosen, because that’s what whiskey barrels are made of. It still breathes that same purpose in being there.”

Among the bar’s early clientele was Jason Pollard, who in 2009 had visited New Orleans, sipped his first Sazerac and was bitten by the craft cocktail bug. The Usual was like a library of libations in which he could research his new fascination. “I started hanging out at the Usual, and finally they were like, ‘Do you want to work here?’” he remembers. “I started in 2011.”

By that time, Dallas’ Cedars Social and Denton’s Paschall Bar were on board the craft cocktail train.

“We were very aware of the fact this was something Fort Worth hadn’t seen before,” recalls Pollard, who would eventually become lead bartender and is now a co-owner. “There was a lot of explaining ourselves in the early days, that we didn’t carry big domestic beers or have 17 flavored vodkas; that we were doing something different.”

While slower weekdays were shared with patrons interested in learning more from bartenders eager to share the history of and riffs on classics like the Aviation, the Negroni, the Last Word or the New York Sour, high-energy weekends were approached with patience for people’s frustrations.

“We were coming in against a city that had a firm drinking culture already, and here we are saying we’re using all fresh ingredients or that we don’t carry Malibu,” Moncrief says. “But it was really cool when you could say to people who wanted Fireball, ‘Well, we don’t have Fireball but I can make you something like that or better.’ It blew their minds to see us use all natural ingredients and create something dazzling. And eventually a lot of people caught on.”

Bars of the Year 2013
The Usual’s wry, loose attitude has been a trademark of this consistently good spot on Fort Worth’s Magnolia Avenue, which marks its 15th anniversary on Nov. 20, 2024.

Moncrief had started at The Usual as a server and after a year was told by co-owner Solis that if she was going to keep working there, she would have to do time behind the bar as well.

“I was really intimidated,” she says. “I didn’t think I had what it took.” But her experience there, she says, would lay the foundation of her current livelihood as catering operations manager for GUSTOS Burger Bar and owner of a pop-up bar business for special events.

“It really taught me so much,” Moncrief says. “The crew was a fantastic group of people and we all strived to be the best we could be. We pushed each other and called each other out on things. It made you believe in the magic of a bar, and of hospitality and the service industry. So many of us now reference those times as an example of what a bar can be.”

Megan McClinton, previously with Thompson’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth, remembers frequenting The Usual before joining the crew for several years in 2017.

“We went there to taste classic cocktails done the right way,” says McClinton, who eventually left for a general manager role at Blackland Distillery and now owns Tricks of the Trade, a boutique bottle shop on South Main. “We knew that’s who was doing it and doing it right. We were all trying to figure out what this craft thing was and that was the place to go in Fort Worth to discover that.”

Despite its limited space behind the bar, The Usual has always wielded an arsenal of adventurous spirits and liqueurs often at the forefront of DFW’s craft-cocktail curve. I made the rounds often in those early days but could always count on glimpsing a bottle at The Usual that I’d never seen before, then asking someone to make something with it.

“It just goes back to us being cocktail nerds and genuinely geeking out about it ourselves,” Pollard said. “When we find something new and interesting, we want to share it with people.”

And unlike some craft bars where you had to time your request or visit with the presence of a specific bartender to have magic happen, The Usual crew to a person was always up to the task. In other words, creativity and experimentation seemed to be part of the bar’s staff expectations. (So, too, apparently, was adequate staffing – I have never been there and found available service lacking.)

Side note: The Usual was responsible for two top-ten finishes in my annual ranking of my favorite cocktails of the year, listings I composed from 2011 to 2020 when the scene was more manageable in size and I had way more freedom to imbibe. In 2014, I gave a nod to Moncrief’s One Million in Unmarked Bills, an herbaceous blend of Ransom Old Tom gin, herbal Zwack liqueur, Dolin Blanc vermouth and Benedictine; in 2018 it was Pollard’s Autumn in Brazil, a luscious mix of sherry and sweet vermouth built atop aged cachaca.

Jason Pollard’s Autumn in Brazil featured Brazilian Avua Amburana cachaca.

The Usual’s upscale date-spot atmosphere has always featured an undercurrent of ease. Those who’ve worked there preach of its family-like and family-oriented camaraderie, one sensitive to work-life balance.

“They were very concerned about your family life and looked at everyone as a whole person,” McClinton says.

The bar has set consistently high standards, with a modest, amusingly composed, brochure-like house menu featuring variations on familiar libations with a wild card or two thrown in.

“You have to balance between what people are going to instantly know they want and things that are going to push people into flavors they haven’t necessarily experienced before,” Pollard says.  

Adds McClinton: “It was about not just making an espresso martini because it’s popular but making something adjacent and outside the box. Not just following the trends, but being inspired by them or even setting them.”

The Usual has seen its share of marriage proposals and once even hosted a wedding, a true community institution that adhered to its craft philosophy even through the strain of the pandemic. Wednesday’s celebration, which kicks off at 5 p.m., will feature a throwback menu and, what’s even more fun – throwback bartenders.

“We have always believed that Fort Worth deserves and needs a space like The Usual,” Pollard says. “Even in the leanest times, we just refused to give up.”

THE USUAL, 1408 West Magnolia, Fort Worth.

Barrel aging, Distilleries, Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Most excellent ideas, Whiskey

Fort Worth’s Whiskey Ranch is a whiskey wonderland — and a boon for Texas spirits

Whiskey Ranch sits on the grounds of the former Glen Garden Country Club in Fort Worth. (Photo  courtesy of Firestone and Robertson Distilling Co.)

Five miles southeast of downtown Fort Worth, on a course where golf greats Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson learned the game, something cool is happening in the world of whiskey.

A spiffy archway off Mitchell Road marks the new portal to what was once the Glen Garden Country Club, a 112-acre property soon to be reborn as Whiskey Ranch. The handsome new development, which opens in mid-November, is the expanded operation of Fort Worth-based Firestone & Robertson Distilling Co., producer of TX Whiskey and, more recently, TX Bourbon.

Whiskey Ranch, though, is much more than a distillery – and it could portend the emergence of this juicy cut ofTexas, from Fort Worth down to Hill Country and the Houston area, as a distillery-rich region along the lines of Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail. Texas, after all, is one of the nation’s largest consumers of whiskey; why shouldn’t it be made here?

“It’s more than likely going to become a beacon of whiskey tourism,” says Nico Martini of Dallas-based Bar Draught, a cocktails-on-tap startup. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this part of the world becomes a known whiskey region.”

Fort Worth, Firestone & Robertson
The facility’s dramatic, 50-foot-high copper column still is fully visible. (Photo courtesy of Firestone and Robertson Distilling Co.)

Owners Leonard Firestone and Troy Robertson conceived Whiskey Ranch not just as a place to make spirits but as a showcase to illuminate the production process, a site for charity and private events and a sampling area, all amid a still functional, par-68 golf course.

Showcase the process it does, with its radiant centerpiece a 50-foot-tall, Louisville-made column still, as well as massive fermenters that can be viewed up close and from a second-level vantage point.

Now, those who tour Firestone & Robertson’s primary distillery will find it nestled in a pastoral setting beyond a guard gate, abutted by a courtyard, retail center, tasting room and special-events space with a sweeping patio overlooking the golf course’s 18th hole.

In terms of property and capacity, the two say, it will be the largest whiskey distillery west of the Mississippi. And to their knowledge, the only distillery on a full-fledged golf course.

Says Robertson: “It’s kind of a whiskey wonderland.”

Firestone & Robertson, TX Whiskey
Co-founder Troy Robertson of Firestone & Robertson heads through the site’s “barrel breezeway” to the Ranch House’s elegant event space.

A PLAN BEGINS

The pair’s plans began to bubble five years ago after they, along with master distiller Rob Arnold, launched their palate-friendly TX Whiskey at 901 Vickery, their original, pot-still operation in Fort Worth’s Hospital District that they simply call “The 901.” Anticipating the need for more capacity to feed the spirit’s growing popularity, they also noticed a market for tours and special events. The idea of a multi-dimensional facility was born.

“We really wanted to share the process,” Firestone says, noting two factors that differentiate whiskey from, say, vodka – an aging component, and thus a need for storage space and more capital. “Whiskey making is really a mystery to a lot of people.”

A map showing the new entrance to the Whiskey Ranch grounds, off Mitchell Road in Fort Worth. (Map provided by Bread and Butter PR, for Whiskey Ranch)

Their eyes fell upon the former golf course, sprawling over the bluff in a modest residential area southeast of the city. Though fallen into neglect and shrouded by a half-century of overgrowth after closing in late 2014, it seemed perfect for their vision.

As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, early opposition arose from some residents fearful of what an alcohol-driven development might bring. Ultimately, though, the city approved the plan.

Firestone & Robertson, Fort Worth
Tours will end in the facility’s Tavern Room, where guests can sample the whiskeys and admire golf memorabilia.

In shaping their vision, Robertson and Firestone took cues from model Kentucky distilleries – the campus feel of Maker’s Mark, the vintage style of Woodford Reserve. Wanting to preserve as much of Glen Gardens’ history as possible, they garnished the tasting room with golf memorabilia and evoked the stone and wood design of the original clubhouse in the grand patio outside.

They also wanted to echo the feel of The 901, whose design incorporates reclaimed materials “partly out of necessity and partly because we liked the look,” Robertson says.

Firestone & Robertson, TX Whiskey
Co-founder Robertson with the TX pour in the facility’s tasting room.

TAPPING INTO THE SENSES

At the new facility, visitors will enter the “Ranch House” foyer, with wainscoting fashioned from repurposed pallets and a mosaic made from the brand’s signature boot-leather bottle tops.

That leads into a rustic retail area and further into what looks to be the classic rickhouse setting of a barrel-aging warehouse. The rows of empty barrels are actually a facsimile of what’s inside the distillery’s working barrel barn, an obsidian-tinted building a stone’s throw away that looks vaguely like a dormitory. It’s the first of five they’ve got planned on the site, ultimately creating room for 20,000 53-gallon barrels.

Firestone & Robertson, TX Whiskey
A patio adjoining the tasting room and special-event space overlooks the golf course’s 18th hole. (Photo courtesy of Firestone and Robertson Distilling Co.)

Firestone and Robertson created the smaller copy, which they call the “barrel breezeway,” since fire codes prohibit large numbers of people from wandering the real thing, Partway through the barrel-lined corridor, a right turn takes you into the chandeliered Oak Room, a special-event space with concrete floors and room for 180 people. More space is available on the patio outside, where two large fireplaces complete the lodge-like setting.

Just inside, through another door, is the so-called “Tavern Room,” where the near-daily tours will end and guests can sample TX whiskeys and cocktails made with them by a staff bartender.

Early on, as 16 months of construction and landscaping began, Firestone and Robertson noticed something as the overgrowth was cleared away: There on the horizon, at the edge of a sea of treetops, was downtown Fort Worth. “We realized we were on this bluff with an incredible view of the city,” Firestone said. “At night, it’s electric.”

That distant skyline view is now the focal point of the courtyard, which stretches from the Ranch House to the Stillhouse. Inside, behind a pair of two-story doors, is the dramatic column still that will allow for continuous production at the facility. Made by Louisville’s Vendome, the copper contraption is a distillery rarity in that it’s fully visible, with a window allowing guests to peer into its bulbous base.

Firestone & Robertson, TX Whiskey
The focus of the courtyard: the Fort Worth skyline view to the northwest.

A walk upstairs lets visitors rise with the copper column and look into the fermenters and see the yeasty bubbling of the mash. The entire experience is meant to tap into the senses, with production “designed to operate completely while still having people around,” Robertson says. “Nothing’s in the back room, so to speak.”

Production at the new facility will be underway by December, taking advantage of four deep-water wells onsite. But Firestone and Robertson will continue to make whiskey and offer tours at The 901, where they’ll also experiment with potential new products.

Their vision, they say, has pretty much aged and turned out as planned. If anything, it’s grander than they imagined, but as Robertson puts it: “Our aspirations have always been to compete at the highest level with the biggest whiskey producers.”

WHISKEY RANCH, 2601 Whiskey Ranch Road, Fort Worth.

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Cocktails are everywhere, Food and spirits, Fort Worth, The maturing scene

I’ll have another: Fort Worth Cocktail Week returns for second annual run

Sean Conner, for The Establishment
The coming week is a celebration of Fort Worth’s booming craft-cocktail scene — and an homage to the kinship between craft bartenders and chefs.

Thompson’s Bookstore. Proper. The Usual. Basement Lounge.

You may have noticed that Fort Worth has a cocktail scene. And while it’s not nearly on the scale of Dallas’ ever-expanding arena, DFW’s western half does have one thing the Big D does not: A cocktail week.

The second annual Fort Worth Cocktail Week kicks off Saturday, even bigger and tastier than its predecessor. Each of six nights’ worth of events will be complemented by chef-designed dishes, with a portion of each night’s proceeds going to charity.

Second time around: This time featuring six signature events, plus chef-driven food.

While billed as “a celebration of our city’s booming craft-cocktail scene,” the week – which runs through next Friday, Oct. 20 – is also a tribute to the kinship between chefs and craft bartenders, both of whom prize fresh and local ingredients and attention to detail and history.

The week will feature a repeat of last year’s five signature ticketed events in addition to one newcomer: Saturday’s “Sips” event, which will highlight before- and after-dinner drinks and cocktails. That event will join a lineup that already spotlights tiki drinks, bourbon, gin, vodka, agave spirits and Texas-based spirits.

Organizers are partnering with local arts and nonprofit organizations like Fort Worth Opera, The Cliburn and Amphibian Stage Productions, each of which will receive part of the ticket proceeds from one of the week’s events. Tickets are available here.

Here’s a list of the week’s events:

Saturday, Oct. 14: “Sips,” 5-8 p.m. at Proper, 409 W. Magnolia. Tickets: $20

The evening will highlight aperitifs and digestifs, from cognacs to Italian bitter liqueurs, “in an indulgent celebration of exquisite before- and after-dinner libations.” Drinks will be complemented by dishes from Fixture owner and chef Ben Merritt, two-time winner of Fort Worth magazine’s Top Chef competition.

Monday, Oct. 16:  Texas Spirits Tasting Party, 6-9 p.m. at Mopac Event Center, 1615 Rogers Road. Tickets: $15-20

This showcase of Lone Star State spirits will feature bites from chef Nico Sanchez (Meso Maya, Taqueria La Ventana), whose latest concept, TorTaco, recently opened in Fort Worth.

Tuesday, Oct. 17: Bourbon Bash, 6-9 p.m. at Thompson’s Bookstore, 900 Houston St. Tickets: $15-20

Bourbons will be the star of this Old World-themed evening at Thompson’s downtown, whether alone or in cocktails. Samples of harder-to-find whiskeys will also be available for an extra charge. The evening’s food will come from chef David Hollister (Yucatan Taco Stand, Gas Monkey Bar and Grill).

Wednesday, Oct. 18: Tiki Drink Rum Party, 6-9 p.m. at The Usual, 1408 W. Magnolia. Tickets: $15-20

A night focusing on the resurgent tropical cocktail trend will be paired with dishes from chef Juan Rodriguez of Magdalena’s Supper Club.

Thursday, Oct. 19: Bartenders Without Borders, 6-9 p.m. at Salsa Limon Distrito, 5012 White Settlement Road. Tickets: $15-20

Agave-based spirits like mezcal and tequila will anchor the evening, including small-batch selections. Chef Keith Grober, former head chef at Rodeo Goat, will provide Mexican street-style food.

Friday, Oct. 20: Gin vs. Vodka Party, 6-9 p.m. at The Foundry District, 2624 Weisenberger St. Tickets: $15-20

Advertised as “a bare-knuckle brawl for the soul of the martini,” this evening will showcase the history, flavors and versatility of the classic clear spirits. Chef Stefan Rishel, head chef at Texas Bleu in Keller, will provide the munchies.

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