Bottoms Up! Interview with Clover Club Founder, Julie Reiner
The Park Slope resident talks about her trailblazing career, her new Saloon, and some of her favorite local spots
It’s not hard to find a fancy bar serving craft cocktails in New York City these days, but that was not always the case. Back in the early aughts, Park Slope resident, Julie Reiner, played a pivotal role in transforming the bar scene in NYC.
She founded pioneering NYC venues Flatiron Lounge (2003-2018), Pegu Club (2005-2020), Lani Kai (2010-2012), Brooklyn’s Clover Club (2008) and Leyenda (2015).
She also penned a book, The Craft Cocktail Party, launched Social Hour Cocktails (canned cocktails), rebooted the beloved Soho dive bar, Milady’s (2022), and judged battling bartenders on Netflix’s reality competition Drink Masters. This summer, Reiner and her team launched The Saloon, a private events space next door to their famed Clover Club in Carroll Gardens.
Originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, Reiner got her start as a cocktail waitress in Waikiki, serving tropical drinks to tourists. She attended Florida State University and studied communications. After graduating, she moved to San Francisco and worked in marketing, but that did not last long.
“I tried to get a real job…one that my parents thought was a real job,” she recalls. “When I went to San Francisco, I started this job where I was sitting at a desk and I was like, ‘this is so boring. This is definitely not what I want to do.’” Reiner worked as a bartender during college and “loved the action of being in restaurants and bars,” so she returned to that “trying to figure out what it was that I really wanted to do with my life.”
While in San Francisco, Reiner met her wife and business partner, Susan Fedroff. The couple moved to New York in 1998 so Fedroff could attend NYU grad school.
Reiner found work at various restaurant bars in the city and remembers, “It was very difficult to get a bartending job in New York at the time. Everywhere I went, people were like, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to cocktail waitress?’ It was all men behind the bars. I was like, ‘Put me behind the bar and you’ll see. I can bartend circles around these guys!’”
She eventually found a job managing the bar at C3, a former restaurant at the Washington Square Hotel. “Growing up in Hawaii I had a mango tree in my backyard. I had a lychee tree in the front yard. Fresh fruit, tropical fruit, was something that was abundant there,” she recalls. “When I was at C3, I started taking a more culinary approach to cocktails and putting out my own menus and seasonal drinks. At that time in New York it was all sour mix on the gun.”
While at C3, Reiner met “King of Cocktails” Dale DeGroff, the legendary chief bartender of the Rainbow Room (1987-1999). DeGroff was a member of a theater on MacDougal Street, not far from C3. He’d heard about the innovative drinks Reiner was concocting and stopped by for a taste. “I had no idea who he was or that anybody else cared about high quality drinks in New York at the time,” Reiner says. “I was just trying to make people the best thing I could in a glass.”
DeGroff was impressed and introduced Reiner to like-minded bartenders, including Audrey Saunders, with whom Reiner would later open Pegu Club. He also spread the word about her creative cocktails. Unfortunately, her bosses at C3 did not appreciate all the buzz Reiner and her drinks were getting, overshadowing the food, and they fired her in 2001.
In 2003, Reiner and Fedroff launched Flatiron Lounge on West 19th Street. The bar elevated cocktail culture in NYC, receiving rave reviews for introducing seasonal drinks made with fresh ingredients and high quality spirits.
Reiner and Fedroff moved to Park Slope in 2006. “I wanted a little more peace. I wanted to be able to exhale when I wasn’t working,” Reiner recalls. “I came out and I walked all over Park Slope and I was like, ‘this is where I want to live.’”
Their daughter attended PS 321 when she was younger, and the couple remains friends with the families they met there. “I love that it’s very family oriented,” Reiner says of the neighborhood. Some of her favorite local spots include Prospect Park; L’Albero Dei Gelati; Fonda; Stone Park Café (for brunch); Mura Sushi (for delivery sushi); Sushi Katsuei (for omakase sushi); Bagel Hole (“best bagels in the Slope”); and Bar Goto Niban (“best cocktail bar in the Slope”).
In 2008 Clover Club debuted in Carroll Gardens to great fanfare. “There wasn’t really anything out here,” Reiner recalls of the neighborhood at the time. “I wanted to open what I wanted to go to in Brooklyn…a classy cocktail bar that had really delicious food.”
Located at 210 Smith Street, in the former Johnnies Bootery, Clover Club focuses on classic cocktails. Named after one of Reiner’s favorite gin cocktails, a “gin drink that everybody likes,” she says, the Clover Club is a mainstay on the menu as well as the Gin Blossom, her variation on a martini, and The Slope, her take on the Manhattan. Clover Club was awarded “Best New Cocktail Lounge in the World” by Tales of the Cocktail in 2009. In 2013, the venue received “Best American Cocktail Bar” and “Best High Volume Bar” and Reiner was named “Best Bar Mentor.”
“We’re always very open to helping people who work with us move onto the next thing in their career,” Reiner notes. “Quite a few people who have started with us have gone on to do incredible things in our industry, from consulting to opening bars, to teaching spirits, or working with brands.”
That support and mentorship helped launch yet another successful venue, the James Beard nominated Leyenda, in 2015. Ivy Mix, formerly a bartender at Lani Kai and Clover Club, wanted to open a bar focusing on Latin American spirits but ran into obstacles trying to open a bar on her own, according to Reiner.
When a storefront across Smith Street became available, Reiner asked Mix to become a partner. “We were like ‘let’s see if [Mix] wants to come in and be our partner and we will facilitate opening this bar that is her passion,’ so that’s exactly what we did.”
Reiner is credited with making the bar industry more welcoming to women, having mentored and championed many female mixologists. “It wasn’t necessarily a calculated thing,” she says. “I started off in San Francisco where there were a lot of women behind the bar. It was a much more inclusive place that I started my career in hospitality, and then I got to New York and…I had to fight to get a bar job and prove myself so much more than any of the men did. They just got the job because they said that they had experience. I had to prove that I could do it.”
“I gave a lot of women opportunities when there weren’t opportunities to be had,” she continues. “One of the things that I did that was very different from a lot of other bars was creating more than one avenue to becoming a bartender. A lot of bars…make the rule that you have to be a barback in order to become a bartender, but they only hire male barbacks because…they have to pick up kegs and whatever. I started training women who were servers, and slowly taught them how to bartend and really put in the time to train people.”
In 2022, Reiner was given the chance to bring back Milady’s in Soho which shuttered in 2014. Reiner had fond memories of the old-school, neighborhood bar. “It was right down the street from C3, so I ended up there after work all the time. It was a total dive, but I’m a firm believer that spaces in New York have a soul and energy to them. That was always a high energy space.”
When she proposed the idea of reopening Milady’s to business partners Fedroff and Christine Williams, she asked “How do we not do this? We are the Miladies!”
Earlier this summer, the trio opened an extension of Clover Club, The Saloon, in the adjacent storefront at 208 Smith, a former dentist’s office.
Decked out with swinging saloon doors, cowgirl wallpaper, and a vintage bar,
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