Behind a bright blue door in Walnut Hills, Comfort Station is hidden in plain sight. The newest bar from Stuart King, one of the founders of Sundry and Vice in Over-the-Rhine, Comfort Station has recently taken up residence in — wait for it — an old public restroom.
“At times (Cincinnati) was very much at the forefront of proper urban society in the United States,” King says. “It was on the vanguard of providing public services, like the public comfort stations.”
In the early part of the 20th century, public restrooms, or comfort stations, were a popular institution spread throughout Europe, and Cincinnati jumped on the bandwagon. Eden Park still has one.
The Walnut Hills Public Comfort Station was built in 1914 and opened on Aug. 11 that same year, King says. The property has been abandoned for many decades, exposed to the elements and damaged, but when King found the spot in 2014, he saw it as a diamond in the rough.
“I found this before Sundry was even under construction, and was completely taken with it right away,” he says. “We had the building locked down, hoping and praying we could come up with something interesting, and it wasn’t until the last year we really started drilling down on this thing.”
The existing building features provided inspiration for the design. King utilized the original upstairs skylights in the main bar space and transformed the basement men’s room into its own small bar, where he says the bartenders can experiment with cocktails to their hearts’ content.
“We try to take a more fun, lighter approach to things (upstairs),” King says. “The downstairs bar is going to be a chance for some of our most talented bartenders to take things not only seriously but really stretch their legs creatively. It’s going to be a much more fine-tuned, experimental approach to cocktailing.”
The contrast between the two spaces — upstairs and downstairs — is marked, and appealing.
Open the aforementioned blue women’s room door and you’re greeted by a bright room with an abundance of hanging greenery. A long velvety blue booth and pops of blue repeat throughout the airy space, and the mirrored bar back makes the room seem larger than it is. It opens onto the back patio, an urban grotto of sorts, complete with mustard-yellow cushions nestled into an elevated seating nook and a wooden stadium-seating built-in.
“Throughout a bunch of research, we got inspired by this light versus dark generality,” King says. “We wanted to create two entirely distinct spaces within the same building, and then we joked that it was a little bit of a metaphor for all of us. Upstairs is what you put on your Instagram, and downstairs is the stuff you don’t tell anybody.”
I started upstairs with an Everything Nice cocktail, featuring gin, lemon, egg white and piquette, a low-alcohol wine. It’s a layered, plum-colored concoction I wouldn’t normally try, as I’m more of a whiskey girl, but I’m glad I expanded my horizons, because it was sharp and sweet and strong.
I followed it up with a red summer wine, a Sevillean specialty that I found to surpass sangria as a fruity, hot-weather-appropriate beverage in every way.
I made my way downstairs a few nights later. The men’s room door isn’t painted any bright color, but there is a small white doorbell; press it, and the door opens immediately.
A host greeted me and my companions and we descended the steps under the glowing neon-red sign proclaiming, “Sin Now, Pay Later.” Indeed.
The downstairs bar’s Instagram handle is @Among_the_Lost, and inspiration from Dante’s Inferno is widely felt in the speakeasy-reminiscent, candlelit space.
I ordered the Happy To See You, a bourbon beauty with sherry, creme de banane and cinnamon smoke from a burnt stick of cinnamon. The cinnamony-burnt-ness pleasantly infused every sip, and the creme de banane and bourbon combo took my taste buds for a ride.
A friend ordered the Barrel Roll, a wildly strong, bourbon-forward cocktail with blackberry, basil and black pepper. The only bummer of the evening came when we wanted to venture back up to the land of the living — there is no moving between the two bars, which is appropriately on-brand.
King’s near-future plans for Comfort Station include programming live music and bringing in a mobile fire pit on the patio, as well as screening the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby on the 100-inch drop-down projector in the upstairs bar. A self-explanatory regular Sunday Day Party is forthcoming. A special Halloween celebration is planned for every Tuesday in October.
For all its conceptuality, King wants to be sure Comfort Station doesn’t take itself too seriously.
“We can be a little bit silly and irreverent about it,” he says.
Comfort Station, 793 E. McMillan St., Walnut Hills, facebook.com/comfortstationcincinnati.
This article appears in Oct 2-15, 2019.