No-Proof Venue Listen Bar Announces World Tour
Originally published in Forbes.
Listen Bar, New York’s popular non-alcoholic bar concept, is going global.
The New York-based no-proof bar, which just finished a month-long residency at the Williamsburg Hotel, has just announced that it’s taking its n/a cocktails and booze-free vibes on the road. Dates and locations are still being finalized, but over the next few months, look for Listen Bar at pop-ups in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago. Over the summer, Listen Bar will jump to international waters, making stops in London, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm and Bucharest. (More stops and cities may be added, based on customer demand.)
Listen Bar founder Lorelei Bandrovschi and her team will be at all the stops along the tour. “The focus is going to be our greatest hits from our menu,” she says. “It’s going to be a combination of our bartending team and bringing in local musicians to bar tend with us.”
That a fully alcohol-free bar not only exists, but has seen enough demand from other cities to go on a multi-stop international tour, points to the growing popularity of the so-called sober curious movement.
“People are ready for a new kind of nightlife,” Bandrovschi says. “People are becoming more vocal about feeling like the odd one out [if they’re not drinking.] You’re seeing people raise their hands and say, Actually I’ve been thinking the same stuff.”
“All of a sudden, this quiet questioning is getting louder and it’s galvanizing people,” she adds. “Listen Bar is a space where all those people fill the room.”
From its launch, Listen Bar struck a nerve with people, many of whom were outside of New York, and who asked for the bar to visit, Bandrovschi says. Recently, Listen Bar asked their fans where they wanted to see the bar. A quarter of the survey respondents were based outside New York; those answers informed the stops along the world tour.
Listen Bar, one of New York’s first alcohol-free bars, came about after Bandrovschi tried to do Dry January some years ago. That first January, she accidentally sipped Champagne, and started noticing how hard it was to be social and not drink. A few years later, she opened one of the most talked about bars in New York. Now on her sixth Dry January and the second year of Listen Bar, Bandrovschi points to the perspective she’s gained as a result. “It’s not about taking away alcohol,” she says. “It’s about creating room in your social life to include not drinking. Once you create room for that, you start wanting to give that little corner more and more space.”
Listen Bar is part of the growing movement of mindful drinkers who may not necessarily call them sober, or reformed alcoholics, but who do take issue with prevalent pressures to drink all the time. “When you’re just going with the flow, you don’t realize how powerful the current is,” Bandrovschi says of society’s messages to drink. “It takes taking yourself out of it to notice all of the subtle nudges in your life that make alcohol a default choice.”
“It’s really exciting that conversations like these exist, to just perk up our antennae and say, Well, do we?,” she says of drinking pressures. “Do we need that everywhere all the time? Maybe not.”
