Category: Devil’s Desk

So, tonight we’re turning Speak of the Devil into a fashion runway.

An actual fashion runway.

Our friends Erik Anderson, Johá Harris and Jevon Terance—three guys who know considerably more about fashion than any of us ever will—are taking over the joint, dressing up our staff and sending them out to model in front of a room full of people.

Our bartenders.

Our servers.

The people who normally spend their evenings shaking cocktails, hauling ice, washing glassware, and occasionally trying to figure out who the hell ordered the last Paper Plane.

They’re going to be MODELS.

Which raises a fairly important question.

WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO MAKE THE DRINKS?

We have absolutely no idea.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We have some ideas. We’re working on it. It’ll be fine.

Probably.

But while contemplating the logistics of temporarily transforming our entire staff into fashion models, it occurred to us that this is hardly the first time we’ve committed ourselves to something without fully considering what the hell we were getting into. That tendency is exactly what the Department of Crazy Ideas is about.

In fact, it’s become something of a tradition around here.

Which brings us to the Department of Crazy Ideas.

Some businesses probably vet ideas properly.

Someone schedules a meeting. There is coffee. A person opens a laptop and says something like customer acquisition strategy. Another person has prepared a spreadsheet. Eventually somebody asks the responsible adult in the room whether any of this makes financial sense.

We are clearly not one of those businesses.

Around here, most things seem to begin with somebody leaning against the bar and saying:

“You know what would be fun?”

These are dangerous words.

They should probably set off an alarm.

Because over the last almost nine years, “You know what would be fun?” has led to a lot of strange behavior at 201 West Fifth Street.

For instance, we once turned Speak of the Devil into Chalmun’s Cantina from Star Wars: Mos Eisley.

Because apparently running a cocktail bar in downtown Lorain, Ohio wasn’t enough. We also needed to operate a drinking establishment on the planet Tatooine.

Another time we became Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca (complete with dress code), which at least kept us on Earth, although several thousand miles and eighty-some years away.

There was an Old School New Jack Swing House Party.

There were Disco Nights.

There were Emo Nights.

And, Jesus Christ, we had somehow completely forgotten about this until we started writing this thing:

SOUL TRAIN SATURDAYS.

Soul.

Train.

Saturdays.

We have questions for our younger selves.

There were poetry performances and comedy shows and trivia nights and karaoke nights. Eventually, karaoke stopped being one of our crazy ideas and became something we just do, which is apparently how this disease progresses.

Same with Tiki Week.

Tiki Week started as one of those ideas that probably sounded perfectly reasonable after a couple of drinks and has now become an actual Speak of the Devil tradition.

Of course, even that wasn’t enough tiki stupidity for us.

At one point Jack entered a Jägermeister cocktail competition and launched what can only be described as a doomed personal crusade to prove that tiki didn’t technically need rum.

It could use Jägermeister.

We went out there.

We fought the good fight.

We made fools of ourselves.

History will decide whether we were visionaries.

History will probably decide we were idiots.

Speaking of questionable cocktail decisions, we have created so many one-night drinks, weekend drinks, event drinks, experiments, accidents, and scraps of paper with ideas on them that we couldn’t possibly reconstruct them all now.

Some cocktails existed here for about 48 hours and then disappeared forever.

Which brings us to one of the great enigmas of Speak of the Devil:

Does anybody remember the Tiny Tim from Christmas 2019?

Because we do. Sort of.

We remember the name.

We remember making it.

We do not remember what the hell was in it.

If you somehow have the specs for the Tiny Tim, please get in touch with us ASAP!

Then there were the wars.

Not one.

Not two.

But three Godzilla vs. King Kong bar battles with our friends at LBM.

These competitions produced drinks of staggering restraint and elegance, like the Skull Island—reposado tequila, soursop, Midori, banana liqueur, lemon, and coconut cream—served in a giant dry ice-laden skull glass with a Little King’s Cream Ale turned upside down in it.

Read that sentence again.

Somebody thought that drink up.

Other people listened.

And instead of anyone saying, No, absolutely not, everyone apparently said:

“We’re gonna need a bigger skull.”

This is the fundamental problem with Speak of the Devil.

There is very little adult supervision.

Which may also explain the 1970s Throwback Night, when we decided to make a cocktail with Tang.

Yes.

Tang.

The powdered orange beverage of astronauts, suburban childhood, and kitchen cabinets everywhere circa 1974.

The cocktail was called The Command Pilot, and because merely putting Tang into a cocktail wasn’t enough devotion to the bit, our friends from Smash Kitchen joined in with a TV Dinner (complete in a 3-compartment tray ) featuring Salisbury steak, garlic mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach and cauliflower.

For one glorious evening, downtown Lorain became a wood-paneled rec room where somebody’s dad was probably adjusting the rabbit ears on the Zenith.

We’ve also opened the doors at 7:00 in the damn morning on Saturdays to become a coffee shop with our friends from My Best Friend’s Coffee.

Twice.

Seven.

A.M.

For perspective, some nights we aren’t entirely convinced a bar ought to acknowledge that 7:00 a.m. exists.

We’ve had Cigar Nights.

We’ve had Booze Schools.

We’ve held The People’s Choice Old Fashioned Competition, because apparently just drinking a traditional Old Fashioned wasn’t enough and we needed democracy to become involved.

We hosted a book club in the bar, Books & Brews, which felt vaguely ridiculous, but people kept showing up and discussing actual literature while sipping drinks. Turns out it wasn’t ridiculous at all.

Then there was Absinthe & Art.

We figured around sixteen people would come.

Seventeen.

Twenty if things got crazy.

Things got crazy.

People just kept coming.

And coming.

And coming.

Until the entire place turned into an overflowing green-fairy psychiatric hospital full of people drawing pictures on mini canvases, and we looked around, wondering what terrible mistake we’d made while also thinking: We absolutely have to do something like this again.

That pretty much sums up the operating philosophy.

There was the Ramen Room, born when our longtime partners in crime at Black Vulture Ramen and a heated patio somehow became a tiny winter restaurant hiding behind a cocktail bar.

There are the Paradise Alley Chronicles, because at some point simply owning a bar wasn’t enough and we apparently decided the building needed its own mythology.

They’re still on our website.

We stand by this decision.

Mostly.

We’ve hosted Jason Lawhead and Friends and turned the room twice in one night for two separate comedy shows, which remains an impressive piece of human Tetris for a bar about the size of some people’s garages.

We’ve had two weddings here.

Actual weddings.

People looked at this strange little room full of bottles and weird artwork and said, essentially:

Yes. This is where we would like to make one of the most important promises of our lives.

Which remains one of the coolest things anyone has ever trusted us with.

Not all of the insanity happened inside the bar.

Once, Kurt somehow wound up playing the bartender in Lorain County Musical Theater’s production of Anything Goes.

Typecasting is real.

 

Perhaps our finest contribution to American civic life, however, came when the United States announced the creation of the Space Force.

Most people read the news.

Maybe discussed it.

We turned Speak of the Devil into the nation’s first unofficial SPACE FORCE RECRUITMENT CENTER.

We recruited exactly zero astronauts.

Or Guardians.

Or whatever the hell we were supposed to be recruiting.

National security somehow survived.

Oh, and we once had a Prize Wheel.

Seriously.

A Prize Wheel.

An actual spin-the-wheel-and-see-what-the-hell-happens Prize Wheel sitting in a cocktail bar in downtown Lorain because, at some point, somebody apparently looked at Wednesday night and thought:

You know what this needs?

Game-show technology.

And nobody stopped them.

That’s really the recurring theme here.

There was a physical wheel. People spun it. Prizes were involved. We voluntarily did this on more than one Wednesday.

We’re not going to attempt to explain Prize Wheel Wednesday any further because, frankly, we think the existence of the phrase “Prize Wheel Wednesday” is all the historical record requires.

And through all of this, there have been the cocktails.

Hundreds of them.

Maybe thousands by now.

Some carefully researched. Some historically important.

Some painstakingly developed over weeks.

And some probably created because somebody held up a bottle at 4:38 on a Friday afternoon and said: “What if we put this with banana?”

That’s the thing about the Department of Crazy Ideas.

There isn’t actually a department.

There is no committee.

There is certainly no budget.

There are just people.

Staff. Friends. Musicians. Cooks. Artists. Writers. Coffee people. Ramen people. Customers. Regulars. Fellow bar owners. Somebody sitting at bar 4 who says something ridiculous that gets very quiet for a second before somebody else says:

“Wait.”

And then you can hear the machinery starting.

Because occasionally the crazy idea works.

Sometimes sixteen expected people become a packed house. Sometimes a wild idea works. And sometimes, against all odds, it reminds us why we keep doing this.

Sometimes the goofy theme night becomes an annual tradition.

Another time the temporary Ramen Room thing becomes regular ramen brunches.

Then crazy karaoke sticks.

Somehow Tiki Week reaches year nine.

Your bartender ends up in a musical.

You serve a drink containing Tang.

Sometimes two people get married in your bar.

And sometimes you pour reposado, soursop, Midori, banana liqueur, lemon, and coconut cream into an enormous skull, jam an upside-down Little Kings into it, slide this absolute monstrosity across the bar, and think:

Yeah…This is why we opened this place.

There are more, of course.

There have to be.

That’s actually the somewhat frightening part of writing this. We know we’re forgetting things. Entire nights have apparently disappeared into the fog. Somewhere there are photographs of things we’ve done that would probably make us question whether we operate a business or a circus.

So consider this less a history than an incomplete incident report.

Almost nine years of bad ideas (anyone remember Dive Bar Night?), good ideas, ideas that should never have worked, ideas that worked far better than they had any right to, and ideas that probably seemed completely reasonable at the time.

Which brings us back to tonight.

When three of Lorain’s most talented fashion guys descend upon this little bar, dress up our crew, and try to make us look like people who have absolutely no business wearing the clothes we’re about to wear.

We’re pretty damn excited about it.

We’re also slightly terrified.

Because, somewhere along the way, somebody actually said, “You know what would be fun? We should have a fashion show in the bar. AND THE STAFF SHOULD BE THE MODELS!”

And instead of immediately calling for help, we all agreed.

So here we are.

Wednesday night. A fashion runway. A room full of people. Three exceptionally talented designers. A bunch of bartenders pretending they know how to walk in a straight line while looking fabulous.

And somebody, somewhere, is going to need a goddamn Martini.

We’ll figure it out.

We always do.

And if history has taught us anything, it’s that sometime in the next few weeks, someone will be sitting at the bar, someone else will be polishing a glass, and there’ll be a little pause before somebody says those six dangerous words:

“You know what would be fun?”

God help us.

 

A few Sundays ago, something small happened at the bar.

Small enough that I probably wouldn’t have given it much thought, except that a few days ago I read an old Esquire piece about the lost art of buying a round.

One of our regulars was sitting at a table. Two other regulars sat across the room at the bar. They do not know one another at all.

I’m pretty sure they’ve been in the same room here a few times, but they wouldn’t recognize each other on the street.

At some point on that Sunday, the first regular handed us a credit card.

“Put theirs on mine, too.”

That was it.

No grand gesture. No raising of a glass. No explanation. Just put theirs on mine.

Later, after realizing what had just happened to their tab, the recipient said something that has stuck with me ever since.

“I don’t think that has ever happened to me before.”

And there it was.

Something bigger than a couple of drinks.

 

I should probably say right here that this is not a public service announcement encouraging everyone to start buying drinks for strangers.

Nobody owes the person sitting three seats down a Manhattan.

There are already enough rules surrounding drinking and bars and tipping and who bought the last round and whose turn it is and all the other bits of social bookkeeping we humans are so good at inventing.

Besides, generosity done because somebody says it is proper bar etiquette isn’t really generosity.

What struck me Sunday was precisely the opposite.

Nobody asked.

Nothing was coming back.

One person looked across a bar at a couple of people he knew, but didn’t really know, and thought, “I’ve got theirs.”

There is something lovely about that.

And increasingly, maybe something rare.

 

We talk a lot around here about the idea of the neighborhood bar.

Probably too much.

After almost nine years behind this particular bar, I still find myself trying to understand exactly what one is.

Because it certainly isn’t geography.

And it isn’t cheap beer, neon signs, or a certain kind of music playing on the stereo.

I think maybe a neighborhood bar begins to become one when the people inside stop being entirely strangers to one another.

Not necessarily friends.

That distinction matters.

Friendship asks something of us. There are dinners and phone calls and birthdays to remember. History. Obligations.

The person you recognize from the other end of the bar asks almost nothing.

You know his face.

She knows what you drink.

You know they usually come in on Thursdays.

Somebody slides over a stool when the place gets crowded. Somebody asks how the vacation went. Somebody notices you haven’t been around for a couple of weeks.

Tiny things.

Almost nothing.

Except, of course, they aren’t nothing.

They are the little threads that make a community.

 

Most nights, hospitality in a bar travels in one direction.

Across the bar.

That’s the deal.

You come through the door, and we take care of you.

We make the drink. We find the chair. We remember what you like. We introduce you to somebody. We notice when you need another and, occasionally, when you probably don’t.

It is our job.

But the best bars—the ones I have loved anyway—eventually develop another kind of hospitality.

Hospitality that starts traveling sideways.

From stool to stool.

Someone moves their coat so a stranger can sit down.

Someone gets pulled into a conversation.

Someone remembers a name.

Someone says, “Try this.”

Someone laughs at something said three seats away and suddenly two separate conversations become one.

Someone walks through the door alone and, without ever quite noticing when it happened, stops being alone.

And every once in a while:

“Put theirs on mine.”

That might be the moment a bar becomes more than a room where alcohol is sold.

When the hospitality no longer belongs exclusively to the people being paid to provide it.

It belongs to the room.

 

Maybe that’s what the old tradition of buying a round was really about.

Sure, somebody had to pay for the drinks.

But the money was almost beside the point.

The round said something.

We’re here together.

For this drink, at least, whatever brought each of us through that door doesn’t matter quite so much.

This one’s on me.

Tomorrow, we’ll have plenty of time to return to our separate lives.

Tonight, for a little while, we’re at the same bar.

 

I keep coming back to the reaction on that Sunday.

“I don’t think that has ever happened to me before.”

There was genuine surprise in it.

And gratitude.

Not because somebody saved them the price of a couple of cocktails.

Because somebody had thought of them.

That’s a different currency altogether.

Maybe we have fewer places for that sort of thing now—places where people who are not quite friends and no longer strangers spend enough time together for these little acts to happen.

I don’t know.

I do know that on Sunday night, in a small bar in downtown Lorain, one person quietly did something nice for another person for no particular reason.

Nobody rang a bell.

Nobody made a speech.

The world did not become kinder because somebody picked up somebody else’s bar tab.

Monday still arrived right on schedule.

But for a few minutes Sunday night, hospitality moved sideways.

Across a couple of barstools.

From one regular to another.

And somebody who came in expecting to buy their own drinks went home knowing that, for no particular reason at all, someone else in the room had thought: “Put theirs on mine.”

That, more than the tab, was the point.

 

 

I woke up twenty-four hours ago, reached for my phone, and found that I had a number of messages waiting.

Then I saw a screenshot.

“This is where we start to say goodbye.”

Well, fuck.

To call it a gut punch doesn’t quite get there.

Our friends at LBM in Lakewood announced that after nine years and a whole lot of fun, they’ll be closing their doors for good on October 10.

I stared at that screen for a long, long while.

Many of you know LBM because of us, and plenty of Cleveland westsiders know us because of LBM. Over the years, we’ve joked about being sister bars or sibling bars, whatever you want to call it. But it was always more than just a bit of friendly cross-town connection.

We were born two months and seven days apart.

Two strange ideas, dreamed up by people who loved hospitality and creativity and believed, perhaps irrationally, that there was still room in the world for places with an actual point of view.

And people thought both ideas were crazy.

They were opening a Viking-themed heavy metal bar in Lakewood.

We were opening a serious cocktail bar in Lorain, Ohio.

Neither idea sounded like a solid business plan.

And yet.

Nine years later, here we are.

Or, more painfully, here we are for just a little while longer.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I saw that post.

Not about bars, exactly.

About places.

The rooms we choose to spend our lives in.

Because somewhere along the way, a place can stop being just a business you frequent. It sneaks across some invisible line. You don’t notice when it happens. There isn’t a ceremony. Nobody hangs a little plaque on the wall announcing that this establishment has now become emotionally significant.

You keep showing up.

And other people keep showing up.

And eventually something happens.

Someone remembers your name.

Somebody knows what you’re drinking before you order it.

You recognize the guy three seats down even though you have absolutely no idea what he does for a living.

You meet someone.

You bring someone.

You celebrate a birthday there.

Maybe you celebrate ten birthdays there.

You stop in because you’ve had a great day and want to share it. Or maybe you’ve had a terrible one and don’t feel like talking to anyone.

You sit down anyway.

That’s the strange alchemy of these rooms.

Community rarely announces itself as COMMUNITY.

Most of the time it looks like somebody sliding over one stool because they see you coming.

It looks like someone asking, “Hey, where’s Mike been?”

It’s someone bringing in a cocktail recipe they found online, hoping Jack will make it for them (he probably will). Someone walks in with a book to recommend to Page. Someone comes straight from the movies to talk to Hiatt about the latest release. Someone brings Wyatt a sample of some strange liqueur to taste and figure out what to do with.

It’s two people who probably would never have met anywhere else arguing about Steely Dan versus New Order.

It is ordinary.

Until it isn’t.

We have a term for these places now: third places.

Home is first.

Work is second.

And then there is somewhere else.

The coffee shop. The barber shop. The library. The corner tavern. The bowling alley. The bookstore. The diner with the same six people sitting at the counter every morning.

Places where, for a little while, nobody particularly requires anything from you.

You don’t need an appointment.

There isn’t an agenda.

Nobody sent you an event invitation.

You can stay twenty minutes or three hours.

You might know everybody.

You might know nobody.

But keep showing up long enough and eventually somebody notices when you don’t.

We underestimate how important that is.

Especially now.

We’ve built a world where almost anything can show up at our front door. Food. Groceries. Books. Drinks. Movies. Music. Even work.

Hell, increasingly, other people.

We carry little glowing screens in our pockets that promise us everything, but somehow we end up spending more and more time alone.

We are endlessly connected.

And sometimes remarkably lonely.

That’s why a room full of people now feels almost wonderfully old-fashioned.

There is no formula involved.

No feed.

No comments section.

Just people.

Sitting next to other people.

On purpose.

I own a bar, so obviously I’m not exactly an unbiased observer here.

But I don’t think this is really about bars.

It’s about place.

And about what happens to communities when we lose the places where they can happen.

Because that’s the part that is easy to miss when one of these places closes.

On paper, a business closed.

There will be spreadsheets, leases, equipment, liquor licenses, and all the cold, practical things that come with ending something that started as just an idea on paper.

Eventually another sign may go up.

Something else may occupy the room.

The world will keep turning.

It always does.

But something is lost that can’t just be passed along with the liquor inventory.

A thousand tiny moments lived there.

First dates.

Last dates.

Bad jokes.

Great songs.

Terrible songs.

Whiskey poured for somebody who just got the job.

A beer poured for somebody who just lost one.

Friends who became lovers.

Lovers who turned strangers.

Strangers who became friends.

People who walked through a door one night because somebody said, you have to see this place.

And nine years later they’re still telling stories that begin:

“Remember that night at LBM when…”

That’s what disappears when a place disappears.

Not the furniture.

Not the drinks.

Not the address.

The possibility of making another memory in that room.

And maybe that’s why yesterday’s news hit me so hard.

Because after nearly a decade building one of these places ourselves, we know just how unlikely the whole thing really is.

Every independent bar, restaurant, bookstore, record shop, or coffee shop—every quirky place someone insisted should exist—is a small act of resistance.

Someone looked at an empty room and imagined people inside it.

They imagined music.

Conversation.

Light.

Noise.

They imagined a Tuesday night that hadn’t happened yet.

Then they signed a lease and scared the hell out of themselves trying to make it real.

Some of those places last six months.

Some last nine years.

Some get lucky enough to last generations.

None of them last forever.

Maybe that’s part of what makes them matter.

So this isn’t a eulogy for LBM.

Not yet.

There are still weeks left.

There are drinks to drink, music to play, hugs to give, and probably several very debatable decisions yet to be made under those Viking helmets.

And I hope that room is absolutely fucking alive until the last person walks out of it on October 10.

But their announcement reminded me of something I think we all occasionally forget.

Go to the places you love.

Not someday.

Go.

Sit at the bar.

Buy the book from the bookstore.

Buy that record.

Drink the coffee at the coffee shop.

See the weird little band you’ve never heard of.

Go to the library.

Eat at the cafe.

Walk into the strange little neighborhood joint somebody told you about and find out why they love it.

Put the goddamn phone down for an hour.

Talk to somebody.

Show up.

Because these places need us.

But maybe, in ways we’re just starting to understand, we need them even more.

LBM wasn’t just a Viking-themed heavy metal bar in Lakewood.

And Speak of the Devil isn’t just a cocktail bar in Lorain.

At their best, places like these are simply rooms we have agreed to share.

And if we’re very lucky, somewhere along the way those rooms become part of the story of our lives.

Maybe gathering places don’t create communities at all.

Maybe they give communities somewhere to happen.

And maybe that’s enough.

 

People call us a lot of things.

A cocktail bar.
A whiskey bar.
A speakeasy.
A specialty bar.

By no means are any of those insulting. Hell, some of them are pretty flattering.

But for almost nine years now, whenever somebody asks what Speak of the Devil is, we have given the same answer – we’re a neighborhood bar.

We’ve been thinking about that lately.

Why, after all these years, do we still insist on calling ourselves that?

Because from the outside, we certainly thoroughly understand the other labels.

We’re a dark little room. We make serious cocktails. There is an unreal amount of whiskey on the shelves. Depending on what you order, somebody behind the bar may end up explaining amaro or agricole rum or why there is fermented pineapple involved in your evening.

We’ve been lucky enough to receive some national recognition over the years. We fuss over ice. We make syrups and infusions and all sorts of weird shit in the back. We own more bitters than any reasonable person probably should.

It certainly looks like the sort of place people now call a cocktail bar.

And it is.

But “neighborhood bar” describes something those other labels don’t.

A cocktail bar tells you what we make.

A whiskey bar tells you what’s on the shelf.

A speakeasy mostly tells you the room’s vibe.

A neighborhood bar tells you what we want the place to be.

And that distinction matters.

Somewhere along the way, “neighborhood bar” became shorthand for a certain kind of place. Cheap beer. Neon signs. A pool table. Maybe a jar of pickled eggs nobody has been brave enough to investigate since 1997.

And sure.

That can absolutely be a neighborhood bar.

But none of those things make it one.

A neighborhood bar is a place you can walk into without having a reason.

That might be the simplest definition I know – you don’t need an occasion. You don’t need to know anything about cocktails. You don’t need to dress differently. You don’t need a reservation, a secret password or an encyclopedic understanding of obscure Italian liqueurs.

You can come in because it’s Tuesday.

You can come in because you had a great day.

You can come in because you had a shitty one.

You can come in because you saw somebody you know sitting through the window.

You can come in by yourself.

You can come in for one. You can stay for three.

You can order something meticulously constructed with six ingredients, a homemade syrup and a story that begins in Havana in 1932.

Or you can have a beer.

Neither person is using the bar incorrectly.

That last part has always been important to us.

We love cocktails here. Obviously.

We love the history of them. We love digging through old books and finding forgotten drinks. We love strange bottles, new ingredients, and figuring out how flavors work together. We love handing somebody something they’ve never tasted before and watching that first little moment when it registers.

But knowing about cocktails has never been the price of admission.

You don’t have to know what you like before you sit down.

That’s part of why we’re here.

And despite all the things we do around here—live music, vinyl nights, book clubs, karaoke, classes, passport adventures, hot dogs, ramen popping up outside, whatever strange idea somebody has talked us into this week—none of those things are really the point either.

They’re reasons to gather.

That’s different.

The point is the room.

The people in it.

The person who stops after work for one beer sitting next to the couple having cocktails before dinner. The regular who knows exactly what they want sitting beside somebody who has never been through the door before. Somebody reading a book at the end of the bar. Somebody telling a story you’ve already heard twice and, yet, somehow, you’re listening again.

Some nights something wonderful happens.

Some nights absolutely nothing happens.

Both can be great nights at a neighborhood bar.

Maybe that’s why we remain a little stubborn about the phrase.

Because “specialty bar” sounds like somewhere you make plans to visit.

A neighborhood bar is somewhere you end up.

And if you’re lucky, somewhere along the way it becomes one of your places.

We take the drinks seriously.

We take the room seriously.

We take being hospitable seriously.

We try very hard not to take ourselves too seriously.

So call us a cocktail bar if you want.

Call us a whiskey bar.

You can even call us a speakeasy, although we may make a face.

But if you ask us?

We’re Speak of the Devil.

Your neighborhood bar.

That’s what we’ve always wanted to be.

The other morning I was reading an interesting piece by Mark Alan Burger in Esquire about being a “regular” at a bar or restaurant.

It made me smile because he was absolutely right. There’s something truly fulfilling about walking into a place where somebody recognizes you, where you don’t have to explain yourself, where the bartender says hello before you’ve quite decided what you’re drinking.

Then I started wondering what that whole relationship looks like from this side of the bar.

I’ve been standing behind one for almost nine years now, and I suspect the view is a little different.

Not better.

Just different.

Funny thing about regulars. People assume they’re the folks who come in all the time. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t.

I’ve seen people come in every Friday for years and remain perfectly pleasant customers. Nice people. Good tippers. Couldn’t ask for better.

And then there’s the person who only wanders in every month or so, yet somehow feels woven into the fabric of the place. Like if they stopped coming entirely, one of the floor planks would begin to creak differently.

I don’t know exactly when that happens.

I’ve never been able to pinpoint it.

There isn’t a ceremony.

Nobody stamps a card and announces, “Congratulations, you’ve made it.”

It just happens.

Quietly. It almost feels accidental.

Now and then someone walks through the door after being gone for a while.

“Sorry,” they’ll say. “Life got busy.” Sometimes “a while” means three weeks. Sometimes six months. Sometimes longer.

Nobody owes us an explanation, of course. Life has a funny habit of barging in with other plans. Jobs change. Kids grow up. Parents get sick. Houses need roofs. The dog eats something expensive.

But when somebody says, “Sorry I haven’t been around,” I always think the same thing – We weren’t keeping score. We were just wondering where you’d wandered off to and hoping everything was alright.

That’s probably the first clue you’ve become a regular.

Not that we missed your business.

We missed you.

The bottles were all still here. The chairs hadn’t gone anywhere. It was the conversation that had been missing.

There’s a difference.

I couldn’t tell you what most people ordered on their first night in. Honestly, I probably couldn’t even tell you what year it was.

But I can remember where some of them sat.

I remember somebody nervously walking in alone for the first time. I remember someone bringing a first date. I remember people introducing friends with a strange sort of pride, as though they’d discovered this little place and wanted to share it without quite wanting it to become too crowded.

Neighborhood bars are funny like that.

Everyone wants their favorite place to be successful. Just not too successful.

I’ve noticed something else over the years:  you become a regular long before anyone behind the bar starts calling you one.

You become a regular the first time you’re driving down West Fifth on a snowy weeknight and catch yourself looking toward the windows and hoping that the bar has a decent crowd tonight.

You become a regular when you hear someone mention “Speak of the Devil” across town, and you instinctively chime in, “Oh, you’ve never been? You’d like it.”

You become a regular when something happens at the bar, and your first thought isn’t, “Maybe we should go.” It’s, “Remember the last time they did this…”

You become a regular when Black Vulture Ramen announces they’re popping up again, and you immediately remember those chilly nights years ago on the indoor patio, the “Ramen Room”.  Back then, nobody really knew what this was all about, except for the handful of us standing there with fogged-up windows and hot bowls in our hands.

Memory sneaks into places like that. It finds places to come to rest.

That’s the part people don’t always see from this side of the stick.

We remember. It’s not because we have exceptional memories – I know mine isn’t – it’s because bars collect people the way old records collect scratches; every nick means something happened:

Somebody celebrated. Somebody cried. Somebody got engaged. Somebody came in after a funeral because they didn’t quite know where else to go. Somebody discovered their favorite bourbon. Somebody swore they’d never drink another Negroni. Six months later…”Maybe I’ll try one again”

I suppose that’s what I’ve come to love most about neighborhood bars. They’re one of the last places where you can become known.

Not famous; just known.

No profile. No passwords or apps deciding what you’ll probably enjoy.

Just enough conversations, “good to see yous,” and enough ordinary evenings strung together that, one day, they aren’t ordinary anymore. They’re simply part of your life.

Burger’s essay made me think about how good it feels to find a place where you’re recognized.

Standing behind the bar, I’d add one small thing.

Regulars don’t just find a place – over time, without ever intending to, they help to create one.

Somebody will walk through our front door tonight for the very first time. Somebody else will walk in and say, “The usual.”

If we’re lucky, and I think we have been, those are the same person- just separated by a few years.

That’s the thing about regulars – they don’t arrive; they accumulate.

And, in the end, maybe that’s all a neighborhood bar really is.

A place where ordinary nights eventually become somebody’s life.

 

 

For further reading:

Mark Alan Burger “The Lost Art of Being a Regular”

One Tuesday a month we carry a milk crate or two into the bar.

Or, sometimes it’s someone’s weathered cardboard box that’s survived three apartments and two divorces. Sometimes it’s a pristine record bag with sleeves worth more than the whiskey in our back bar. Sometimes it’s just one LP tucked under an arm because they absolutely, positively need the room to hear Side A.

And every time we think the same thing:  There are easier ways to listen to music.

Our phones themselves contain more songs than any record store in America did in 1978. Spotify tries to predict what you’ll want to hear before you know it yourself. If convenience were the goal, Turntable Tuesday wouldn’t exist.

But convenience has never been the goal. Records ask something of you.

You have to choose one. You have to carry it here. You have to hand it to another human being. You watch them lower the needle. Everyone in the room hears your choice—not through earbuds, not in the privacy of a car, but together.

For the next twenty minutes, the room belongs to that record.

That’s a remarkably vulnerable thing.

You aren’t just playing music. You’re saying, “This is something I love. Maybe you’ll love it too.”

Sometimes it’s Miles Davis. Sometimes it’s Motörhead. Sometimes it’s Dolly Parton, Curtis Mayfield, Outkast, Tom Waits, Steely Dan, Japanese city pop, obscure Ethiopian jazz, or a one-hit wonder that instantly sends someone back to high school.

The point isn’t agreement.

The point is discovery.

We’ve watched strangers become friends because someone asked, “Who is this?” We’ve seen conversations begin because of a B-side. We’ve watched people who had never met argue—politely—about the better pressing of Kind of Blue while sharing a cocktail.

None of that happens because vinyl sounds better. It happens because vinyl slows us down.

A record has two sides. It asks for patience. It refuses to be skipped after fifteen seconds. It reminds us that albums were once sequenced journeys instead of playlists assembled by goofy algorithms.

It creates little pockets of attention in a world determined to fracture it.

That feels increasingly valuable.

Speak of the Devil has never really been in the cocktail business. Cocktails are simply the excuse we use to gather people around tables.

Books & Brews isn’t about books. Cocktail Karaoke isn’t about singing. Our booze schools aren’t really about booze.

And Turntable Tuesday isn’t ultimately about records.

It’s about giving people permission to share the things they love with people they’ve never met before.

The cocktails help.

The records do the rest.

There are cocktails. There are classics. And then there are drinks so old they blur the line between history and folklore.

Every Fourth of July week, we haul out the punch bowl and mix a batch of Philadelphia Fish House Punch. We’ve been doing it for years, and we’ll probably keep doing it as long as there are thirsty people willing to gather around a bar.

Why?

Because this isn’t just another old cocktail. It predates the United States itself.

The story begins sometime in the 1730s along the banks of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, where a group of prominent merchants, politicians, outdoorsmen, and all-around bon vivants formed what became known as the Schuylkill Fishing Company—better known as the State in Schuylkill. Despite the name, they seemed to spend nearly as much time eating, drinking, and debating the affairs of the day as they did fishing.

Legend says their clubhouse became a regular stop for some of the biggest names of the Revolutionary era. George Washington is often mentioned. So are Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Whether every story is true hardly matters anymore. Like all good drinking tales, history and mythology have become inseparable.

What we do know is this: they created one of America’s great punches.

Made with rum, peach brandy, fresh lemon, and sugar, Philadelphia Fish House Punch is deceptively smooth. Contemporary accounts warned that it was far stronger than it tasted. One nineteenth-century writer famously claimed it was “so delicious that one hardly realizes how much has been taken.”

History seems to back that up. The punch earned a reputation for quietly humbling diplomats, politicians, and distinguished guests who underestimated its cheerful appearance.

Long before Americans were ordering Martinis, Old Fashioneds, or Manhattans, punch was the social drink. A bowl sat in the center of the room. Friends gathered around it. Conversations stretched for hours. Deals were made. Arguments settled. Toasts offered. Communities built.

That’s probably the part we love most.

Sure, we appreciate the history. We appreciate the recipe. But what keeps us making Philadelphia Fish House Punch every Independence Day isn’t simply that it’s old.

It’s that it reminds us what bars are supposed to do.

A good bar isn’t just a place to order a drink. It’s a place where people gather. Where strangers become regulars. Where neighbors become friends. Where stories are traded as freely as cocktails.

Nearly three hundred years after someone first ladled this punch into a waiting glass on the banks of the Schuylkill, we’re still doing exactly that here in Lorain.

Some traditions are worth keeping.

So if you stop in this Fourth of July week and see a punch bowl sitting on the bar, know that you’re not just ordering a drink.

You’re taking part in one of America’s oldest drinking traditions.

We think that’s worth raising a glass to.

People often ask us what Speak of the Devil is.

The easy answer is that we’re a cocktail bar.

And that’s true, I suppose.

We have a wall full of whiskey. We spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about vermouth. We make drinks from recipe books older than most of us and occasionally become obsessed with obscure ingredients that nobody can pronounce and only a handful of people seem to care about.

But that’s not really what we do here.

What we do here is gather.

That may sound overly simple, but in an age where most of our conversations happen through screens, where loneliness has become an epidemic, where people can go days without a meaningful interaction with another human being, we’ve come to believe that gathering is one of the most important things people can do.

The cocktail just happens to be the invitation.

The drink is the excuse.

The real purpose is everything that happens afterward.

It’s the couple on a first date sitting nervously at the corner table. It’s the retired teacher catching up with former students. It’s the jazz musician finding an audience. It’s the book club arguing over a novel. It’s the stranger who walks in alone and leaves having met three new friends. It’s the old friends who haven’t seen each other in years and somehow pick up exactly where they left off.

We have watched marriages begin here and weddings happen here. We’ve watched anniversaries celebrated here. We’ve watched friendships form. We’ve watched people find jobs, find opportunities, find community and, sometimes, find themselves.

That’s what we actually do here.

The cocktails matter. We take them seriously because craftsmanship matters. A well-made drink is an act of hospitality. It’s a signal that someone cared enough to get the details right. But the drink has never been the destination.

The destination is connection.

That’s why the room is small.

That’s why we host jazz.

That’s why we started a book club.

That’s why we spin records on Turntable Tuesday nights.

That’s why we teach classes about whiskey, gin, amaro, bitters, syrups, and the stories behind the things we drink.

That’s why we keep inventing strange little programs like Ports of Call and passport adventures and cocktail schools.

Not because they’re clever.

Because they give people a reason to sit together.

To talk.

To laugh.

To listen.

To belong.

The best moments in this room rarely happen behind the bar. They happen across it.

They happen when a table of strangers becomes a table of friends.

They happen when someone says, “Pull up a chair.”

They happen when a musician starts a song and the room collectively goes hush to listen.

They happen when a group of people realize they are participating in something increasingly rare: a genuine community.

Long before Speak of the Devil existed, bars served as gathering places. They were where neighborhoods celebrated victories, mourned losses, shared stories, traded news, and made plans. They were living rooms for people whose homes weren’t large enough to hold everyone they cared about.

We’ve always liked that idea.

So yes, we are a cocktail bar.

But more than that, we are a place to gather.

A place to celebrate.

A place to learn.

A place to listen.

A place to meet.

A place to belong.

Good drinks bring people in.

Community gives them a reason to come back.

And that’s what we actually do here.

So, welcome, feel free to drop in and be a part of what we do.

suggested further reading:

David Coggins on What Makes a Good Bar

Sean Kenyon on the Importance of Neighborhood Bars

Why Bars Matter