Miami’s Calle Ocho has always been a main artery of the city’s rich Cuban culture, home to some of South Florida’s best food, music, and—on one glorious March afternoon in 1988—the world’s longest conga line.
Within the last few years, though, Little Havana’s Calle Ocho has emerged as a bona fide nightlife destination, thanks in part to the wild success of places like Ball & Chain. So, it’s no surprise that others are investing in the strip. The latest concept to call Calle Ocho home is Bar Nancy, a new cocktail bar that will be celebrating its grand opening on Saturday, April 15.
“There’s something happening,” Bar Nancy co-owner, Sasha-Alexandre Torres, says of his new neighborhood. “It’s had many incarnations. It’s reinvented itself a few times. I don’t know if it’s the centrality it has with the city…I don’t know what it is.” But, whatever the driving force behind Calle Ocho’s nightlife success, Torres is hoping to capitalize on it.
He’s been happy thus far with the way things are going at Nancy, which has been doing a soft-opening for the last two weeks. Though this is his first time managing a bar in Little Havana, he’s no stranger to Miami nightlife. And neither is his partner Ben Koufopoulos, who has contributed in some form or another to places like Purdy Lounge, Burger and Beer Joint, Will Call, PB Station, Pawn Broker and the Stage, which Torres owned before selling it in 2015.
Bar Nancy will try and separate itself from others in the area with a carefully crafted cocktail menu. The nautical bar (Nancy was the name of a ship that raised the first American flag in a foreign port after the Revolution) is serving up cocktails ($12–$14) with a seafaring theme: there’s the Over the Barrel, a concoction of whiskey, rye, molasses and a garnish of candied bacon. The Biggs and Wayne is a delightfully bizarre mixture of Jamaican rum, jerked carrot and coconut milk. And the Moonraker tosses moonshine, barley reduction, lemon curd, sesame oil, purple corn foam and Batavia Arrack (an old-school colonial favorite brewed from sugarcane and fermented red rice) into the same glass.
It’s all been a fascinating glimpse into cocktail culture for Torres, whose background is in live music. “I’ve never worked in a cocktail bar and these [bartenders] are chefs—they’re hydrating this, dehydrating that, smoking this. It’s a science, and they’re good at it and they love it.”
Nancy does have a small menu of bar favorites as well, including its take on a frita Cubana.
Saturday’s grand opening will feature live music from local favorites Spam Allstars, Juke and the Woodwork. Doors open at 5pm and complimentary cocktails will be dished out from 7pm to 9pm.
Landlubbers are welcome.
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