Bloom's

Bloom's is the late-night cocktail lounge just off the lobby of Hotel Ulysses at 2 E Read Street in Mount Vernon, which opened in September 2022 inside the 1920s Latrobe Building. The room is the opposite of restrained: the Baltimore Sun described a low-lit, velvet-clad lounge with mirrors covering the walls and ceilings, warm pink petal lamps, floral arrangements and plush purple velvet bar stools, and The Baltimore Banner summarised it more briskly as a disco ball of a bar. Esquire named it to its thirty-three best bars in America in 2023. Food is deliberately minimal and salty — house-roasted almonds, marinated olives, rosemary chips — because this is a drinking room that happens to open late rather than a restaurant with a bar attached. It serves from 5pm Tuesday through Sunday, to 1am on Friday and Saturday, closed Mondays, with reservations through Resy.

The zero-proof drinks have their own printed heading and are priced at $14, within a couple of dollars of the full cocktail list rather than discounted into a lesser category. Both are built on Seedlip. The No Negroni uses Seedlip Garden 108 with Earl Grey tea and Giffard's alcohol-free aperitif — the tea doing the tannic work that gin would normally do, and the Giffard supplying genuine bitterness rather than a sweetened approximation. The Naquiri is built on Seedlip Grove 42 with guava, lime and orgeat, and one detail matters more than the rest: orgeat is an almond syrup, and the menu lists almonds in the ingredients, so this is not a drink to order past a nut allergy. There is nothing cannabis-infused anywhere on the menu — the only "N/A" marking beyond the cocktails is on a non-alcoholic Peroni — which is worth confirming explicitly in a state where zero-proof headings increasingly hide THC. Hotel Ulysses lists Bloom's as one of four dining rooms currently operating in the building.