Berwick’s is partly an island getaway and fully a testament to Houston’s abundant, albeit occasionally overlooked, bar culture. Owner Robin Berwick knows all too well the brilliance of her local bar scene, having worked at the lauded lesbian bar Poison Girl, the boundary-pushing Anvil, and the coffeeshop-meets-cocktail bar Double Trouble. After years of helping to usher Houston’s drinks into the national spotlight, Berwick is adding her own vibrant stamp to the landscape.
Berwick’s cocktails put a tropical twist on classics, like the Crocodile Tears Martini, which adds coconut water, dried limes and sea salt to a base of vodka, while the Day-O’ Fashioned, an ode to Civil Rights hero and artist Harry Belafonte, throws banana liqueur and Double Trouble’s cold brew concentrate into the mix. The food menu, from Joshua Peterson and Jacob Pate, offers a lineup of bar snacks with personality and is just as impressive as the cocktails.
Berwick is explicit that this is not a tiki bar. Instead, it draws on the travel experiences dating back to her youth through her dad’s work in Veterans Affairs, and channels her long dream of working in a hotel lobby bar. This bar may take a different tack—rather than being in a hotel, it’s an unpretentious abode with ample outdoor seating in Houston’s Heights neighborhood—but it still brings lucious, refreshing, elegant cocktails to a city just as warm as the islands she dreams of.
Day-O’ Fashioned
This cold brew-spiked cocktail, made with rum and banana liqueur, leans into the bar’s tropical theme.
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For an Aperol Spritz that feels like it’s made for the Caribbean, opt for the Safari Sunset.
The citrusy, cool cucumber salad is one of the few non-fried bar menu options in the entire city and the beloved jalepeño-laden smash burger and jerk chicken wings are part of rotating daily happy hour specials.
Robin Berwick is an icon of Houston’s bar scene.
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So many tropical bars in the U.S. offer escapism. But Bar Kabawa, a den for Caribbean drinks and some of the best bar food in New York City, makes you feel like you’re exactly where you want to be. Down an alley in the East Village, the sibling bar to fine dining restaurant Kabawa is built for hanging, impressing out-of-towners (or your date), playing dominoes and dreaming of being a regular. The theme is simple: Everything’s made with rum (save for the N/A drinks), and half of them are Daiquiris. You might think that working within such specific parameters is limiting, but one sip of the punchy, floral Bay Leaf Daiquiri or bite of a short rib and conch patty would prove you very, very wrong.
The cocktail list is a collaboration between beverage director Kathryn “Pepper” Stashek and chef Paul Carmichael, who channels the flavors of his upbringing in Barbados. To develop recipes, Stashek researched Caribbean cocktail history via sources like Jeff Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean and old manuals from iconic bars like El Floridita and Sloppy Joe’s. While nods to that long history are a through line (there’s a deep-cut Daiquiri called the Golden Glove on the menu, and a shaved ice machine to channel the original frosty Daiquiris), the cocktails also feel fresh and new, revamped with novel techniques like flash freezing and nitro muddling. Describing one of its drinks, a guava-infused rum Old-Fashioned, Bar Kabawa says, “[it’s] how we do things in the Caribbean: simple, or not so simple, but full of flavor, full of life.” That could very well describe the place itself.