The Bluebird Cocktail Room

The Bluebird Cocktail Room is a literary-themed bar upstairs on Hickory Avenue in Hampden, opened in 2017 by Paul Benkert, previously bar manager at Woodberry Kitchen. His stated brief was refreshingly unpretentious for a room this considered: he was basically making a bar that he wanted to go to. The result is a small, romantic space above a Belgian beer bar, reached by a staircase, with the literary theme carried through the drinks list rather than pasted onto the walls. It has become one of the reference cocktail rooms in a neighbourhood that has several.

The non-alcoholic drinks sit under their own printed heading, "Zero-Proof Cocktails", and the bar's approach is to build zero-proof versions of its own drinks rather than keep a separate token list. Baba's Bee's Knees is the clearest example — the full-strength version is gin with the bar's own kombucha, and the zero-proof build keeps the kombucha, honey and lemon while dropping the spirit, so the drink that arrives is recognisably the same cocktail. A zero-proof Daiquiri and a Sage and Maple Smash complete the printed list, and the menu notes that additional non-alcoholic spirits are available, which in practice means the bartenders will build something off-list if you tell them what you like. That flexibility matters here because the list rotates hard: press coverage from 2024 and 2025 named a zero-proof Mata Hari, built on non-alcoholic whiskey with lemon, chai and grenadine, and a kombucha-infused Vain Desires, neither of which is on the current menu. Treat any named list, including this one, as a snapshot of the house style rather than a guarantee, and note the bar publishes ingredients for its alcoholic drinks but not its zero-proof ones. One last practical point, because it genuinely catches people out: published sources disagree about both the street number and which floor the bar is on, giving 3600 or 3602 Hickory Avenue and the second or third floor. What is consistent across all of them is the landmark — look for the Belgian beer bar at street level and take the stairs up.