Episode 96: Romeo’s East Village With Evan Hawkins

Romeo’s opened in New York City this past December, promising to bring a new kind of cocktail experience to the East Village. For this episode, we talk to owner Evan Hawkins about the kind of bar he wanted to open with Romeo’s, and about how the bar combines his years of experience bartending in nightclubs with the lessons he learned at craft cocktail bars like Mother’s Ruin and Broken Shaker. Find Romeo’s on Instagram: @romeosnyc

Radio Imbibe is the audio home of Imbibe magazine. In each episode, we dive into liquid culture, exploring the people, places, and flavors of the drinkscape through conversations about cocktails, coffee, beer, spirits, and wine. Keep up with us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber, we’d love to have you join us—click here to subscribe. 

Read the Episode

Paul Clarke 

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. 

And can we talk about cocktail bar ecosystems for a minute? Consider a city of your choice and where it stands right now in terms of the overall number and range of styles and the general stage of excellence of cocktail bars in that city. Just 15 or 20 years ago, most major cities, when you’re thinking about cocktail culture, were relatively barren. There were few fortunate cities would have maybe one or two places that were starting to figure things out and hoping to someday extend their range and their reach in that city.

Now, however most metro areas and a lot of smaller cities as well, have extensive vibrant cocktail cultures. And the cool thing here is, as this culture developed in each of its respective places, those bars opened and evolved and functioned in relation to one another and by extension from one another, with bartenders and staff and ownership intermingling over the years and spreading a kind of creative cross-pollination. 

The reason I’m going down this bar-as-ecosystems rabbit hole right now is because for this episode we’re featuring a new bar that’s recently opened in one of the most fertile cocktail ecosystems on earth, the East Village in New York City. But while Romeo’s is a new bar, its roots run deep in New York City, and it aims to evoke its own kind of personality, while also showing that familial relationships with the rest of the city’s bar culture. 

Romeo’s just opened a few months ago and for this episode we’re chatting with the bar’s owner, veteran bartender Evan Hawkins, about the path that led him to Romeo’s and about what the bar brings to guests today. 

[music]

Paul Clarke

Evan, welcome to Radio Imbibe.

Evan Hawkins 

Hey, how are you? 

Paul Clarke 

Thanks for joining us. As I was mentioning to you before we started recording, I wanted to have you on because from time to time we like to share some insight into a relatively new or notable cocktail places and relate how they got there and what they’re doing. You obviously have a relatively new bar in New York City. Romeo’s in the East Village. And you opened earlier this year, is that correct? 

Evan Hawkins

We opened in December of 2023. 

Paul Clarke 

Okay. About four months ago, from the time that we’re talking.

Evan Hawkins 

Yeah. 

Paul Clarke

For people who haven’t yet had a chance to stop by, what’s the general idea behind the bar and its atmosphere? 

Evan Hawkins

I really wanted to do something different than your standard cocktail bar in New York City. I wanted to do something livelier, just brighter, weirder, more neon fun, super unpretentious, accessible. You know, after years and years of being in this industry and years and years of being in New York, I just wanted to do something that stuck out like a sore thumb because that was kind of the goal. I wanted to step away from the standard leather banquette, the standard red brick and Edison light bulbs, and the man cave-ness of the days of yore.

So I really wanted to do something that was kind of like very timely, nostalgic and applied to all those things. We have 6-by-6 square white tile with black grout, and there’s demi lune mirrors and neons and heart neons and just movies playing in the background. I just kind of wanted it to be a real visceral and fun experience. 

Paul Clarke 

And, you know, I was talking to a couple of my colleagues in New York City, Penelope and Emily, and they both mentioned your bar to me, and they both also said, I think he’s really into movies. And you mentioned the movies. How does that kind of translate through into what you’re doing? 

Evan Hawkins 

I originally wanted to go to school for film and I mean, I did. I went to school for creative writing and script writing in English and a minor in film. And, you know, I originally wanted to be a writer and director, and I was a latchkey kid among, you know, I’m a child of the eighties, so I had a single mom and, you know, it was just come home and finish homework and then put in movie after movie until I was comatose and could go to bed. So I just got obsessed as a kid and I was just soaked up every type of cinema. And I find them a great talking piece, especially in a bar like we don’t have subtitles, we just have the movie on in the background.

So, you know, at any time I really want the goal to be like, you look up and you’re like, What movie is this? You know what I mean? And hopefully I’m there to just, like, pop up behind you and be like, Oh, it’s this movie from like, you know, directed by this person and came out in 1976 and it’s super dope. And you should look at it, you know, I don’t know. I just…

Paul Clarke

I would imagine you also tell who’s seen that movie also …

Evan Hawkins

Yeah …

Paul Clarke

By like, you know, people who are kind of tuned in to it, like maybe know some of the dialogue and stuff.

Evan Hawkins

Exactly. You know, we serve popcorn. It’s one of the things that we do. Like the moment you sit down, we give you a free thing, a popcorn that we make in-house. It’s super delicious. We put, like, spices and seasoning on it, But it’s just kind of part of the experience. I want you to sit down and have fun and interact and talk about the place and interact with it. I feel far often in the cocktail bar world, we are tertiary to the experience …

Paul Clarke

Right.

Evan Hawkins 

Right? Like you’re supposed to sit in your seat. It’s supposed to be quiet, you’re supposed to order your drink, you’re supposed to have your drink. Drink is good, have your conversation with your people and then leave. I just feel like it’s, I want people to like, actually interact with Romeo’s. That was the goal. 

Paul Clarke

Now, we’ve been talking about the bar, but we also want to talk about you because you are not at all new to this kind of thing. You have a resume that includes stands at Mother’s Ruin, Broken Shaker, Goodnight Sonny, bars that have contributed greatly to New York’s cocktail bar culture in recent years. When you were thinking about starting your own place, do you kind of answer this just to some degree? But when you were thinking about starting Romeo’s, what kind of need did you see out there, and what kind of need did you see in yourself for the kind of place that you wanted to offer? 

Evan Hawkins 

I come from a very interesting background: I come from two splits. I did, you know, the first half of my career was in nightclubs, so did like 12 or 13 years in nightclubs, bartending in wild establishments where, you know, you were just getting beat up every day, bodies after bodies after bodies. And I did that before I started doing cocktails and working in the cocktail world. So that kind of informed my style, my vibe, my understanding of the business, the need for volume and understanding how those two things meet. And then I started working in cocktail places that were basically as big as nightclubs. So it was like, Oh, now you got to make cocktails, but you’re as busy as a nightclub. So it was kind of like the blending of those two ideas.

We don’t have servers. It’s a order-at-the-bar kind of experience, but the drinks are top tier. I mean, we have hand-cut ice and, you know, we’ve got rice paper garnishes and, printed chocolate coins and all these things, these little touches that regular cocktail bars do. But it’s like rowdy. So that was kind of what I wanted.

I wanted it to be like, You’re coming to this place and you’re like, What is it? And then you get a drink and you’re like, Whoa, this drink is actually really good. I wanted the drinks to almost be secondary or even tertiary, like I wanted it to be: You come in, experience the bar, interact with the bar, and you stay for the drinks because they’re that good. So that was kind of really what it was. It was just like I felt this need to provide a different level of bar service to New York. You know, I wanted us to get out of the stuffy cocktail bar experience and give it more of a vibe. 

Paul Clarke 

Now, you wanted to make the drink secondary or even tertiary to that, but we’re Imbibe. So we’re going to ask you about the drinks.

Evan Hawkins 

Yeah, of course. 

Paul Clarke 

Because, it does come part and parcel with the bar. And you know, we ran a recipe recently for one of your house cocktails, a spicy avocado margarita, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. But many of your many drinks seem to follow this kind of familiar, classically rooted kind of approach, but maybe with a small touch of something extra. What’s the general approach that you have with the menu when you’re thinking about something where you want to deliver? Yes, this is tasty. This is delicious. But also you don’t want this to necessarily be like, you know, the spotlight draw on the room. 

Evan Hawkins 

My approach was that I didn’t want to leave the audience out. The other thing that I find in this day and age especially, is that we kind of leave the guest out of the experience at a cocktail bar. We write a menu for ourselves and then the guest has to interact with it, and then the guest maybe doesn’t know what half of the ingredients are when they’re reading the list or they don’t know what it’s going to taste like because it’s named something super clever, you know? 

Paul Clarke 

Mm. 

Evan Hawkins 

So for me, I wanted the experience of, you know, what you’re going to order when you order it, but it tastes so good that you’re surprise. Like, you’re like, wow, Like that actually was way more than what I thought it was going to be. I wanted the names to be classic in their rooted nature. I wanted them to describe the drink as it was, but I wanted the execution of the drink to be superior. 

Paul Clarke 

What’s your process like when you’re starting thinking about a new menu cocktail? Do you start with that point of familiarity with a cocktail, like choosing a classic and seeing what they suggest to you? Or do you have some kind of ingredient or flavor in mind? And then think, you know, that would go amazing in a Mai Tai, or we can incorporate this in such a way and people would relate to it on that level. But we’re also kind of like sneaking under the radar a little bit. 

Evan Hawkins 

Yeah, that’s exactly it. Like, I try to you know, I’ve worked at a lot of cocktail places and I’ve had to do a lot of menus and I’ve had to to to work with a lot of different ingredients. And you start to realize after you’ve done, like, I don’t know, 50 or 60 menus that you’re like, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. Like, I can’t reinvent the wheel. And creatively reinventing the wheel so many times is like soul draining because you just you you can’t tap into it enough every time you want to flip a menu. 

Paul Clarke

Right. I would imagine at some point you think, Do we really need all these wheels? 

Evan Hawkins 

Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I just want to make you a Pirelli tire. Like, I just really want to make you the greatest wheel possible and that you know, that it’s a wheel. Like I don’t have to go in and, you know, it’s not a wheel. It’s shaped like an octagon, and it’s like some newfangled thing. I really wanted to take cocktails because I believe that there’s, you know, there’s like eight mother cocktails, right? There’s like, there’s literally and all drink recipes are derived from these kind of eight mother drinks.

So whenever we flip a drink, I always think about several things. What’s the construction of the beverage? What section of the menu is it is because the way that we have our menu section now is we have the shaken, the stirred and we have the highballs. So the highballs are going to be a long drink with soda or some sort of carbonated situation or the stirred or obviously stirred in the shaken or obviously shaken. So if we replace one of those beverages, what is the hole that it’s filling? And if it is going to fill a hole, you know, what’s the season? What’s in season right now? What’s fresh?

You know, like we’re getting ready to flip next week about four drinks for our summer menu because we’re going to keep most of the drinks. That’s the other thing is I didn’t want to do full menu flips because I think full menu flips are terrible because they oftentimes take what people start to get acclimatized to and then you remove it and do something completely different. I like having a menu, seeing the ones that people really gravitate towards and then the ones that people don’t really gravitate towards. Then we flip those and change it and see how people really do. And if they never do, then we just keep flipping what isn’t working. 

Paul Clarke 

And understandably, Romeo’s is only a few months old at this point, so you’re still kind of tracking where it’s going and what’s going to do where do you see yourself steering the bar in the months and years ahead based on what you’ve learned over these past few months of running it? 

Evan Hawkins 

Just to keep it fun to keep that environment as inviting. You know, my friends and I joke when you walk into a place that you really like, we call it a warm hug because that’s the way it feels when you walk into it, like just a space that holds you in and as makes you feel comfortable. And that’s just one thing that will always be paramount in my drive is to keep the space, that inviting fun environment and then always trying to steer the drinks in a way that the audience and the guests can accept. I don’t want to alienate anybody, right? This is a place for everybody. This is a place for any all walk of life, no matter what kind of day you’re having. I want you to walk in here and be like, Oh, this place is fun.

And I don’t want you to look at the menu and be like, I have no idea what any of these things are. One of the other adages that I like to use is like, I don’t ever try to create a menu that I can’t hand to my mother, you know, like she’s my base level honey. It’s like if I hand my mom a district menu, is she going to be like, I have no idea what any of this says.

Like, I want to make sure that people know what they’re ordering, you know? And also, our menu is up on the wall. So it’s up on the wall. It’s illuminated and it has pictures of the drinks. So not only does it say what the drink actually is, but there’s a picture of it so that you know exactly what you’re going to get when you order. I want to just you know, I want to keep that level of communication with my guests. 

Paul Clarke 

Fantastic. Evan. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. I can’t wait to actually get into Romeo’s and check it out for myself soon. 

Evan Hawkins

I would love that, Paul. Thank you. 

[music]

Paul Clarke 

You can find Romeo’s online at romeosnyc.com and on Instagram at @romeosnyc. Just follow the links in this episode’s notes to get there. And that’s it for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We’ve got plenty more stories and recipes for you on our website at imbibemagazine.com. Keep up with us on social media, on Instagram, Threads, Pinterest, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here’s your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. 

I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.