Death & Co. Made Cocktails Cool. Now They’re Coming for Boutique Hotels
Great bars have long been a luxury hotel amenity. For new hospitality brand Midnight Auteur, they’re the entire point
Municipal Grand’s lobby bar serves family-style batched drinks at happy hour.
Photographer: Kelly Calvillo
“It’s meant to be a little tight and hot,” says David Kaplan, co-founder of Death & Co., the New York bar (now chain) that made eight-ingredient craft cocktails a thing. He’s showing me through the nightspot in the basement of Municipal Grand, his hotel in Savannah, Georgia. “You’re going to bump into people as you go to the bathroom. The music will be loud. The cocktails will come out fast,” he says.
I’m touring the property before its July opening, not just to see the space itself but also to understand how it fits into a bigger picture of what the 43-year-old is creating with burgeoning hotel brand, Midnight Auteur. Municipal Grand is the first hotel he and his partners have created from scratch; it follows the Ramble Hotel, a 2018 Denver opening in which he runs the food and beverage and that was declared “the very picture of contemporary boutique chic” by The Michelin Guide.