Down One Bourbon Bar’s New Menu Focuses on Tacos, Bourbon
If you like your tacos with bourbon, Down One Bourbon Bar & Restaurant is your place. Photos by Kevin Gibson
The newly reopened Down One Bourbon Bar Bourbon Bar & Restaurant is back with a concept that blends Mexican fare with a big bourbon selection in a somewhat unlikely combination.
The previous menu before the restaurant closed two years ago did have tacos and other Mexican fare, but there also was a bent toward Southern and other American food, such as biscuit-based dishes, burgers and sandwiches.
The new food menu is all about the custom taco concoctions, each of which is served on an eight-inch tortilla – which is to say two of them will probably get most people full. But you can also get your favorite on a Bolillo roll as a sandwich or over cilantro-lime rice and borracho beans as a bowl.
The choices are pretty diverse. El Jeffe features beef barbacoa in chipotle sauce, topped with cotija cheese, radish, pickled red onion and cilantro; the Drunk Yardbird is tequila-lime chicken with shredded lettuce, shredded cheddar, pico de gallo and cilantro crema; and the El Borracho is slow-cooked pork carnitas, shredded, with cotija, pickled red onions and cilantro crema. There’s a veggie version (Rabbit Food), a fried fish edition and several others.
El Borracho Bowl.
It should be noted that a couple of the taco options lean toward a more mainstream palate appeal, such as the Gringo, a basic ground-beef taco, and 3 Little Pigs, made with country ham, BBQ pork and bacon.
A couple of salad options are available, along with smoked brisket chili, and appetizers like smothered nachos, guacamole and chips and, in a hard left away from the Mexican theme, cheese curds. The house salsa is a thick, smoky chipotle salsa that comes with salty, house-made chips.
The space itself features doors that can be raised to make the restaurant indoor/outdoor, a sitting room, a side dining area, and the main bar area, which hasn’t changed much, but looks refreshed and clean, with plenty of tall tables plus a long bar along one wall that is fully stocked.
The bar menu features classic cocktails like an Old Fashioned and a house margarita, along with others, plus a bourbon list that looks to be roughly 100 strong, with plenty of the basics and a few harder-to-find bourbons like George T. Stagg, Pappy Van Winkle 15- and 20-year, Old Forester Birthday Bourbon and Wild Turkey Decades.
Down One will be open Monday through Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 12 a.m. and Saturday from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m.
