Back to Spring / Summer 2008 Issue
Putting the City in Morehead
The Arendell Room mixes urban elegance with Southern charm, serving up classic cocktails in a classy setting.
by David Hall
Close your eyes for a moment against the clamorous din of the night. Taste—savor and discern—the timeless interaction between fresh lime, single barrel Caribbean rum and plain old Coke.
Listen to the light baritone of Frank Sinatra during the Reprise years, audible above the hum of the crowd but not loud enough to hinder conversation. Breathe in, as deeply as you want. That’s right: You’re in a bar in North Carolina, and nobody’s smoking.
Open your eyes, and you half expect to see the Chairman himself across the room at a dimly lit mic stand, laying down the bars of “Fly Me To The Moon” in a loosened tie and a cockeyed fedora.
The Arendell Room, Morehead City’s new oasis in an old-school cocktail desert, is that kind of place. Getting into the tiny bar, a private club opened in late 2007 by entrepreneur Trace Cooper, doesn’t require a Gangland connection or a password at the door, but it feels like it could.
Make no mistake, though: While decor and atmosphere are major considerations, the Arendell Room is all about the cocktail.
Cooper, a 36-year-old Atlantic Beach native who happens to be the mayor of his hometown, has crammed an abundance of good living into his time on the planet. He’s earned a law degree, dabbled in the music business and ridden the wave of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, putting in time on both coasts.
All the while he’s developed and cultivated a deep appreciation for classic cocktails, and he brings a little piece of everything he’s learned over the years to his place in downtown Morehead City. When it comes to Cooper’s favorite drinks—he leans toward the tried-and-true concoctions of days gone by—he is passionate and opinionated, serious but short of brash. There is no house specialty at Cooper’s place, just time-honored methods and a commitment to doing things a certain way.
“Instead of one specific cocktail, it’s our theory of cocktails, which is using all fresh ingredients, squeezing our juices fresh and taking time to make the drinks right while focusing on the classics,” says Cooper, a single real estate developer by day who describes himself as a “cocktail geek.” “A drink’s been around 150 years because it’s good.
“I go to restaurants because they can cook better than I can, and a lot of times bars don’t deliver the same way. They just do it fast and cheap.” Not here, where patrons are enveloped in the delicate light emanating from beyond the bar, the brainchild of a prominent New York designer Cooper commissioned through a friend.
The shotgun-style room, at a cozy 900 square feet, is strikingly small and narrow. A 4 1/2-foot walkway from the front door to the back flows between a tall, rustic brick wall and the gleaming bar, which has just 23 stools. Behind the bar is perhaps the most eye-catching quirk of the Arendell Room’s cosmopolitan decor. About 400 backlit Mason jars serve as a backdrop to the establishment’s liquid inventory, creating a crystalline effect with a clever nod to the room’s Southern roots. The soft glow from the jars, like the vintage black ceiling tiles, Sinatra’s crooning and even the meticulously planned height of the bar, are all “by design,” a phrase Cooper uses often when discussing the room’s nuances. The scant space, which Cooper sought out expressly, serves a dual purpose: It helps keep the rent down and the overhead low while lending a crowded feel to even the smallest of gatherings. No more than 30 people lined the bar on one Saturday night this spring, and the place felt completely happening.
“I like the smallness of it, because you can put 10 people in here and it looks like you’ve got a crowd,” says Denny Shrock, the bar’s manager and Cooper’s right-hand man. “And that helps build a crowd.” The somewhat novel, intimate setting notwithstanding, Cooper wants to build a crowd over the long term. Describing his business as “really just a neighborhood bar at heart,” he wants to avoid being known as the New Trendy Bar in town. “You can’t be open two years and make any money,” says Cooper, dressed in jeans, an Oxford shirt and a tan sport jacket. “You’ve got to be open for 10. And those are the places that are just really comfortable, and that’s what we’re trying to do—just really be a neighborhood bar with a little bit of style.”
AN EDUCATION
Cooper’s sense of style, when it comes to bars and cocktail lounges, anyway, was well-earned. After growing up in Atlantic Beach, heattended Vasser College in Poughkipsee, N.Y. Armed with an undergraduate degree and a bit of wanderlust, Cooper headed West, where he worked for a company that manages bands in Los Angeles and San Francisco. After a stint at an independent record label in the Bay City, where he says he did “business affairs and a little bit of everything,” he switched coasts.
Cooper earned a law degree from Columbia University in New York and then returned to the other side of the country, working for a firm that represented startups in Silicon Valley. When the dot-com market went south, Cooper went East. He returned to the Crystal Coast to start a Morehead City real estate development venture with business partner Brad Pulley.
“After working with all these entrepreneurs, people starting their first company or their fourth company, I got the bug,” says Cooper, who specializes in residential and mixed-use development. “I just got tired of working on somebody else’s deals, so I decided to move back here and open my own company.” In his travels, Cooper’s cocktail education reached the graduate level. From San Francisco’s Red Room and Bourbon & Branch—a true speakeasy where there really is a password at the door—to the hot spots of L.A. to Harlem’s iconic jazz clubs, Cooper honed his palate and formed a deep appreciation for potent potables done right.
With his family already in the hospitality business, including a hotel and an Atlantic Beach restaurant, Cooper thought he’d give it a try. So with virtually no practical experience, he began to study the possibility of opening an upscale bar in a secondary market like Raleigh or Greenville. But that changed when, accustomed to the posh saloons and old-style cocktails afforded the urban, he found himself without a place to hang out. So he began the process of opening one.
“It wasn’t just that,” Cooper insists, refuting a popular and erroneous claim about the Arendell Room’s origins. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m bored.
Let’s open a bar.’ It was something we’d been thinking about doing, but not necessarily in Morehead.”
Cooper found the bar’s current location, a jewelry shop and a seafood restaurant among its former lives, in sad shape. With considerable help from Pulley, he went about the task of gutting the place down to the studs and then chipping away at a stubborn concrete coat that hid the tall brick wall from the eyes of time. Some of the original ceiling tile was unsalvageable, and portions of the crown molding had to be improvised discreetly with PVC pipe. The egress between the wall and the bar was calculated to the inch to meet ADA standards, as Cooper and Pulley stood with a code book and a tape measure to get it just right.
The bathrooms at the back of the house, which due to the narrowness of the building have to open with sliding doors, didn’t close automatically as required. The innovative Pulley improvised by tilting the track after tearing out a wall to get to it. “Now they’re selfclosing,”
Cooper says with a chuckle, “but it’s just gravity.”
Cooper got noted New York designer David Weeks, who specializes in high-end light fixtures and chandeliers, to assist with the design in exchange for the experience.
But Weeks, an Athens, Ga., native whose work has been featured in the Metropolitan Home Design 100, the New York Times and Oprah Winfrey’s O At Home, has still never been to the Arendell Room. He conceived the bar’s distinct look from his Brooklyn studio via correspondence. Cooper would send photos of the place to Weeks, who responded with a sketch of an idea. Cooper and Pulley would then build a mock-up of Weeks’s vision and e-mail a photo back to him until each element had been suitably tweaked.
Cooper told Weeks he wanted to build a neighborhood bar, not something that was too slick. “We’ll do a place that my dad won’t feel intimidated to go into,” Weeks told him. Weeks came up with the Mason jar design, an inventive homage to Southern heritage, as a result.
A businessman first, Cooper has the charm of a politician without a hint of the disingenuousness. He says a group of citizens talked him into running for mayor, an office he won last October from an incumbent. Cooper says he has no political aspirations above the local level. His hope for the Arendell Room, though, is that it is the first in a string of similarly named bars around the region he plans to someday open. His company is looking at New Bern or perhaps Greenville as places his simple, elegant approach could work.
And the non-smoking policy? Cooper says it was simply “a business decision” based on data indicating that only 20 percent of Eastern North Carolinians smoke every day. His reasoning that he’d rather go after the other 80 percent is another example of how Cooper is feeling out the subtleties of the bar industry.
“This place is kind of our bar lab, just to kind of test the business out and try to get our systems in place and see if it’s a business we actually want to be in,” Cooper says. “So far, so good.”
SERIOUS TASTE
If the Arendell Room is a lab, Shrock is the scientist. A 37-year-old Indiana native, the soul-patched Schrock has lived on the Crystal Coast his entire adult life, putting in 21 years in the restaurant and bar business.
On a warm spring Sunday afternoon, the bar’s small, close-knit staff and a handful of friends closed the doors for a group tasting as Shrock and Cooper fine-tuned the summer cocktail menu. While Cooper sits at the end of the bar behind a sea of old recipe books, he rattles off the brief histories of several cocktails as Shrock begins a veritable parade of classic American drinks.
Shrock mixes a Jack Rose — named for a notorious gangster in the 1930s, Cooper points out — and passes it down the bar to varying reviews. Shrock makes another, altering the amount of grenadine to make it more sour than sweet. “That’s why we measure here at the Arendell Room,” Shrock says, and everyone laughs.
Bartender Christy Reisz pounds away with a mortar and pestle at fresh mint leaves bound for a Mojito.
Cooper, meanwhile, sips a Cuba Libre — the bar’s classic rum and Coke — as he debates with Shrock the precise amount of lime required. “If you’re going to put a rum and Coke on the cocktail menu,” Cooper says in all earnestness, “it’s got to be the best rum and Coke anyone’s ever had.”
With the right ingredients and an intimate atmosphere that would make Sinatra a regular, it just might be.
Listen to the light baritone of Frank Sinatra during the Reprise years, audible above the hum of the crowd but not loud enough to hinder conversation. Breathe in, as deeply as you want. That’s right: You’re in a bar in North Carolina, and nobody’s smoking.
Open your eyes, and you half expect to see the Chairman himself across the room at a dimly lit mic stand, laying down the bars of “Fly Me To The Moon” in a loosened tie and a cockeyed fedora.
The Arendell Room, Morehead City’s new oasis in an old-school cocktail desert, is that kind of place. Getting into the tiny bar, a private club opened in late 2007 by entrepreneur Trace Cooper, doesn’t require a Gangland connection or a password at the door, but it feels like it could.
Make no mistake, though: While decor and atmosphere are major considerations, the Arendell Room is all about the cocktail.
Cooper, a 36-year-old Atlantic Beach native who happens to be the mayor of his hometown, has crammed an abundance of good living into his time on the planet. He’s earned a law degree, dabbled in the music business and ridden the wave of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, putting in time on both coasts.
All the while he’s developed and cultivated a deep appreciation for classic cocktails, and he brings a little piece of everything he’s learned over the years to his place in downtown Morehead City. When it comes to Cooper’s favorite drinks—he leans toward the tried-and-true concoctions of days gone by—he is passionate and opinionated, serious but short of brash. There is no house specialty at Cooper’s place, just time-honored methods and a commitment to doing things a certain way.
“Instead of one specific cocktail, it’s our theory of cocktails, which is using all fresh ingredients, squeezing our juices fresh and taking time to make the drinks right while focusing on the classics,” says Cooper, a single real estate developer by day who describes himself as a “cocktail geek.” “A drink’s been around 150 years because it’s good.
“I go to restaurants because they can cook better than I can, and a lot of times bars don’t deliver the same way. They just do it fast and cheap.” Not here, where patrons are enveloped in the delicate light emanating from beyond the bar, the brainchild of a prominent New York designer Cooper commissioned through a friend.
The shotgun-style room, at a cozy 900 square feet, is strikingly small and narrow. A 4 1/2-foot walkway from the front door to the back flows between a tall, rustic brick wall and the gleaming bar, which has just 23 stools. Behind the bar is perhaps the most eye-catching quirk of the Arendell Room’s cosmopolitan decor. About 400 backlit Mason jars serve as a backdrop to the establishment’s liquid inventory, creating a crystalline effect with a clever nod to the room’s Southern roots. The soft glow from the jars, like the vintage black ceiling tiles, Sinatra’s crooning and even the meticulously planned height of the bar, are all “by design,” a phrase Cooper uses often when discussing the room’s nuances. The scant space, which Cooper sought out expressly, serves a dual purpose: It helps keep the rent down and the overhead low while lending a crowded feel to even the smallest of gatherings. No more than 30 people lined the bar on one Saturday night this spring, and the place felt completely happening.
“I like the smallness of it, because you can put 10 people in here and it looks like you’ve got a crowd,” says Denny Shrock, the bar’s manager and Cooper’s right-hand man. “And that helps build a crowd.” The somewhat novel, intimate setting notwithstanding, Cooper wants to build a crowd over the long term. Describing his business as “really just a neighborhood bar at heart,” he wants to avoid being known as the New Trendy Bar in town. “You can’t be open two years and make any money,” says Cooper, dressed in jeans, an Oxford shirt and a tan sport jacket. “You’ve got to be open for 10. And those are the places that are just really comfortable, and that’s what we’re trying to do—just really be a neighborhood bar with a little bit of style.”
AN EDUCATION
Cooper’s sense of style, when it comes to bars and cocktail lounges, anyway, was well-earned. After growing up in Atlantic Beach, heattended Vasser College in Poughkipsee, N.Y. Armed with an undergraduate degree and a bit of wanderlust, Cooper headed West, where he worked for a company that manages bands in Los Angeles and San Francisco. After a stint at an independent record label in the Bay City, where he says he did “business affairs and a little bit of everything,” he switched coasts.
Cooper earned a law degree from Columbia University in New York and then returned to the other side of the country, working for a firm that represented startups in Silicon Valley. When the dot-com market went south, Cooper went East. He returned to the Crystal Coast to start a Morehead City real estate development venture with business partner Brad Pulley.
“After working with all these entrepreneurs, people starting their first company or their fourth company, I got the bug,” says Cooper, who specializes in residential and mixed-use development. “I just got tired of working on somebody else’s deals, so I decided to move back here and open my own company.” In his travels, Cooper’s cocktail education reached the graduate level. From San Francisco’s Red Room and Bourbon & Branch—a true speakeasy where there really is a password at the door—to the hot spots of L.A. to Harlem’s iconic jazz clubs, Cooper honed his palate and formed a deep appreciation for potent potables done right.
With his family already in the hospitality business, including a hotel and an Atlantic Beach restaurant, Cooper thought he’d give it a try. So with virtually no practical experience, he began to study the possibility of opening an upscale bar in a secondary market like Raleigh or Greenville. But that changed when, accustomed to the posh saloons and old-style cocktails afforded the urban, he found himself without a place to hang out. So he began the process of opening one.
“It wasn’t just that,” Cooper insists, refuting a popular and erroneous claim about the Arendell Room’s origins. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m bored.
Let’s open a bar.’ It was something we’d been thinking about doing, but not necessarily in Morehead.”
Cooper found the bar’s current location, a jewelry shop and a seafood restaurant among its former lives, in sad shape. With considerable help from Pulley, he went about the task of gutting the place down to the studs and then chipping away at a stubborn concrete coat that hid the tall brick wall from the eyes of time. Some of the original ceiling tile was unsalvageable, and portions of the crown molding had to be improvised discreetly with PVC pipe. The egress between the wall and the bar was calculated to the inch to meet ADA standards, as Cooper and Pulley stood with a code book and a tape measure to get it just right.
The bathrooms at the back of the house, which due to the narrowness of the building have to open with sliding doors, didn’t close automatically as required. The innovative Pulley improvised by tilting the track after tearing out a wall to get to it. “Now they’re selfclosing,”
Cooper says with a chuckle, “but it’s just gravity.”
Cooper got noted New York designer David Weeks, who specializes in high-end light fixtures and chandeliers, to assist with the design in exchange for the experience.
But Weeks, an Athens, Ga., native whose work has been featured in the Metropolitan Home Design 100, the New York Times and Oprah Winfrey’s O At Home, has still never been to the Arendell Room. He conceived the bar’s distinct look from his Brooklyn studio via correspondence. Cooper would send photos of the place to Weeks, who responded with a sketch of an idea. Cooper and Pulley would then build a mock-up of Weeks’s vision and e-mail a photo back to him until each element had been suitably tweaked.
Cooper told Weeks he wanted to build a neighborhood bar, not something that was too slick. “We’ll do a place that my dad won’t feel intimidated to go into,” Weeks told him. Weeks came up with the Mason jar design, an inventive homage to Southern heritage, as a result.
A businessman first, Cooper has the charm of a politician without a hint of the disingenuousness. He says a group of citizens talked him into running for mayor, an office he won last October from an incumbent. Cooper says he has no political aspirations above the local level. His hope for the Arendell Room, though, is that it is the first in a string of similarly named bars around the region he plans to someday open. His company is looking at New Bern or perhaps Greenville as places his simple, elegant approach could work.
And the non-smoking policy? Cooper says it was simply “a business decision” based on data indicating that only 20 percent of Eastern North Carolinians smoke every day. His reasoning that he’d rather go after the other 80 percent is another example of how Cooper is feeling out the subtleties of the bar industry.
“This place is kind of our bar lab, just to kind of test the business out and try to get our systems in place and see if it’s a business we actually want to be in,” Cooper says. “So far, so good.”
SERIOUS TASTE
If the Arendell Room is a lab, Shrock is the scientist. A 37-year-old Indiana native, the soul-patched Schrock has lived on the Crystal Coast his entire adult life, putting in 21 years in the restaurant and bar business.
On a warm spring Sunday afternoon, the bar’s small, close-knit staff and a handful of friends closed the doors for a group tasting as Shrock and Cooper fine-tuned the summer cocktail menu. While Cooper sits at the end of the bar behind a sea of old recipe books, he rattles off the brief histories of several cocktails as Shrock begins a veritable parade of classic American drinks.
Shrock mixes a Jack Rose — named for a notorious gangster in the 1930s, Cooper points out — and passes it down the bar to varying reviews. Shrock makes another, altering the amount of grenadine to make it more sour than sweet. “That’s why we measure here at the Arendell Room,” Shrock says, and everyone laughs.
Bartender Christy Reisz pounds away with a mortar and pestle at fresh mint leaves bound for a Mojito.
Cooper, meanwhile, sips a Cuba Libre — the bar’s classic rum and Coke — as he debates with Shrock the precise amount of lime required. “If you’re going to put a rum and Coke on the cocktail menu,” Cooper says in all earnestness, “it’s got to be the best rum and Coke anyone’s ever had.”
With the right ingredients and an intimate atmosphere that would make Sinatra a regular, it just might be.
