The neighborhood spot
On any given day, it’s a good guess as to what kind of music people are jamming to at Avondale’s newest craft cocktail and eatery, Avondale Common House & Distillery. If you aren’t sure, just take a quick look at the craft cocktail menu, which includes Soulshine, Street Car Radler, Eat a Peach, Spring Street Smash and other reminiscent names.
“The people we are seeing now are on their fifth, sixth, seventh visit, and you don’t see that with every restaurant,” co-owner Ellen Rogers said.
Generally, the “Avondale crowd” she has noticed coming into the Avondale Common House & Distillery as regulars are fans of the music playing and get a kick out of the drink names on, as well as the painting of Guitarist “Mikey” Houser on the wall.
“We play a lot of Widespread Panic, Phish, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, Blues Travelers,” Ellen Rogers said. “And the list goes on.”
Ellen Rogers and her husband, William Rogers, the executive chef and co-owner, have a long history of being in the restaurant business together. Both were looking to start something new in Birmingham that they could really be proud of.
Ellen and William attended culinary school and worked under Chef George Reis at Ocean and 26 in Five Points South, where they met. Seven years later, they were married and still in the fine dining industry. But as of the beginning of this year, they’ve both put their energies into their first self-started project: Avondale Common House & Distillery.
For a while, Ellen Rogers said, investors were searching for someone to take over the space that was previously occupied by the Wooden Goat, which closed in October. After they approached William Rogers in January, a few conversations followed over the course of the month until he officially took over the space and brought on Ellen Rogers. From there, it was a quick two-month flip.
They opened Avondale Common House & Distillery on May 10.
“We want to be the neighborhood spot where you and I can just go for drinks,” Ellen Rogers said. “We want to be where people come all the time.”
Even though the couple actually live in Avondale, they were accustomed to working in the Southside and Lakeview areas. Nonetheless, Ellen Rogers said, it’s been wonderful embracing “the monster,” as she jokingly called it, that is the Avondale area.
The most popular day of the week so far for Avondale Common House & Distillery has been Sunday, when there’s typically a line out the door, according to Ellen Rogers. Between 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Sunday, live music is featured on the covered patio, and the drink and brunch menu stays popular.
She said their most popular item on the menu by far has been a one-of-a-kind dish, crispy Kung Pao cauliflower, which is cauliflower cooked like Kung Pao chicken. Other favorites include the buffalo cauliflower po’boy and salads like the marinated watermelon BLT. Avondale Common House & Distillery tries to source local ingredients as much as possible and have many of them delivered daily.
“[Our menu] has been well-received, since this is a healthier part of town,” Ellen Rogers said.
The store is connected to Avondale Spirits and has the same master brewer, Nate Darnell. All of the cocktails featured at the store are made from Avondale Spirits products, which include three gins, three vodkas, a rum and a bourbon made next door.
“We pride ourselves on having $5-$6 craft cocktails, which a lot of times is hard to find,” Ellen Rogers said.
That’s how Ellen Rogers hopes for their new storefront to stand out. “Birmingham loves to go out for good drinks, go out for good food, and we are just trying to tap into that,” she said.
In addition to their Avondale cocktails, they have eight Avondale beers on draft and their own hand-crafted house wines. After the Rogers tried about 15 red wines and 15 white wines, they decided on two of each and blended together a House Red and House White. Since they’ve opened, both blends have been extremely popular, Ellen Rogers said, and they’ve even run out of them before.
“The white is refreshing, not too dry, perfect for sitting on the patio,” she said, adding that the patio seats about half the restaurant. “The red has a peppery taste; I love it. They are both chilled and come out at just the right temperature.”