The End of an Era: Vegas’s Downtown Cocktail Room Is Closing

On an average Saturday night, the stretch of Fremont Street just east of Las Vegas Boulevard hums. Twenty-somethings in town for the weekend zigzag across the street, ducking beneath the twinkling garlands of Lucky Day and glowing tentacles of Discopussy, slamming shots on the rooftop of Commonwealth, and swarming the DJ booth at We All Scream. It all makes for a loud and glossy whirlwind of a night for Fremont East’s demographic of the moment — and a far cry from what Michael Cornthwaite, the owner of Downtown Cocktail Room, describes as “the glory days” of the neighborhood.

With Fremont Street’s locals-first ethos and the frenetic and spendthrift Tony Hsieh days behind him, Cornthwaite sees the best years of his bar in the rearview mirror. He tells Eater he will close Downtown Cocktail Room and its rear-room bar Mike Morey’s Sip ‘n’ Tip in November — a closure that, in many ways, marks the end of an era for the glittery block.

Cornthwaite remembers seeing an area rife with “untapped potential” when he opened Downtown Cocktail Room in January of 2007. “It was the center of the city and if you went all the way back to the ’60s and the ’70s, it was like Main Street USA,” he remembers. At the time, neighboring businesses took the form of the Fremont Medical Center and the Metropolitan fingerprinting building. Commonwealth was a place called Hollywood Fashion. Discopussy was a luggage store. To open DCR, Cornthwaite needed to obtain a special license since, at the time, bars could not open within 1,000 feet of each other. “It effectively prevented any type of bar-hopping entertainment type district,” he says. “And that’s why it was so special.”

Michael Cornthwaite

Michael Cornthwaite

A simple marquee affixed to the brick wall at the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard marks the entrance to DCR. First-time visitors clumsily paw at the windows before finding the one that gives way to a dimly lit bar swaddled in deep red tones and angled spotlights. Most of the seating is lounge-style with padded sofas crowded around small tables. At the rear, bartenders work behind a bar pouring classic cocktails and mixing signature drinks from a seasonal menu. Drinks take the form of the Killa Kiwi — a blend of vodka, kiwi puree, vanilla syrup, and lemon; or the Downtown Dill — a riff on a bloody Mary with gin and cucumber. It’s also one of the only bars in town that can reliably make a banging Ramos Gin Fizz — assuming the night is early enough (and the tip is sufficiently generous) to afford bartenders the requisite five minutes or so to dry shake the mix until frothy.

The bathrooms are surprisingly memorable here, with stalls partitioned with two-way mirrors. In 2017, Cornthwaite converted a rear event space into Mike Morey’s Sip ’n’ Tip. The adjacent spin-off skews industrial rather than sexy with narrow booths that demand to be piled into and an extended bar for regulars who prefer to chat up longtime bartenders.

Soon after opening, the trio of the Griffin, Beauty Bar, and DCR led to an uptick in foot traffic — Cornthwaite, who also co-owned Emergency Arts and the Beat Coffeehouse & Records, estimates 90 percent of customers at that time were local. He opened DCR without any bartop gaming machines, a rarity at the time, one he hoped would redirect attention to a local and cocktail-savvy clientele.

As a Chicago native, Cornthwaite remembers feeling, when he came to town, that Las Vegas was so laser-focused on tourism and gaming that the local was a “second-class citizen.” Inspiration for Downtown Cocktail Room struck him on a trip to New York after visits to speakeasy-style cocktail bars. Cornthwaite had hoped to create a solid happy hour in the early years, catered toward the nearby city employees and law firms. “But the tradition was to go to your car and go home at five to Summerlin or Henderson,” he says. The 2007 opening predated the population density that would come with the coinciding openings of the Soho Lofts, Newport Lofts, and Ogden residential buildings.

Chelsea McManus

Then came Tony Hsieh. In 2010, the former CEO of Zappos relocated the company to downtown Las Vegas and invested $350 million in his new neighborhood. “For a lot of people that were in the neighborhood and taking risks and working really hard to get a little bit of a boost, that was really fantastic,” says Cornthwaite. With the infusions of real estate investments and Zappos employees, business became steady for the cocktail bar. “To me, that was the real renaissance,” says Cornthwaite. “That was the Gilded Age of downtown.”

He says he remembers it as a time when one could walk down Fremont Street and pass Harry Reid, Andre Agassi, and Morgan Spurlock in one day. As anyone who was remotely Hsieh-adjacent in the early 2010s knows, shots of Fernet-Branca flowed freely. Cornthwaite developed cocktail recipes with his tenured bartenders George, Kevin, Jackie, and Amber, sharing the excitement of making something innovative and special. “Things were exciting and they were happening so quickly and it was happening within my walls,” says Cornthwaite.

While Fremont East prospered, the broader downtown area began to change. In recent years, the Las Vegas Arts District became a nightlife hub in its own right, drawing potential customers from the Fremont area. New businesses set up shop near DCR. The Beat Coffeehouse space was bought out and replaced by a location of the Eureka restaurant chain. Corner Bar Management began its overhaul of the block, opening vibey and sheeny bars with DJ booths and Capri Sun-style drinks and bottle service. “The bigger, flashier, more recognizable, shinier objects have emerged,” says Cornthwaite. “In a lot of ways, it’s amazing for downtown. For an underground locals’ speakeasy, it’s not the same thing.”

Corner Bar Management

Like other businesses, Cornthwaite also faced challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic with changing customer behaviors and cost of goods increases that would demand raising cocktails prices over $20 to remain viable. Nearly 20 years since he first took out a lease on the building and three years after relocating to Colorado, Cornthwaite says he just isn’t part of the neighborhood’s target demographic anymore. “I don’t consider myself to be on the cutting edge of food and beverage and entertainment,” he says. Ultimately, the DCR closure has been a long time coming, he says.

The pioneering cocktail bar was one that firmly established itself as a stalwart of Las Vegas’s drinking culture within the last decade or so. It was a reliable location for first dates, an easy first stop on a bar crawl or post-dinner nightcap, and a regular haunt for the city’s movers, shakers, and cocktail fiends. Cornthwaite says it never quite reached the romantic heights it knew in those years between 2010 and Hsieh’s death in 2020. “It’s just as much fun for me now as it was five or 10 years ago, to know the history and to see how things have changed, and to feel that satisfaction,” he says. “I don’t think most people get to feel that kind of satisfaction in their whole life.”

Downtown Cocktail Room and Sip ‘n’ Tip will close sometime between November 8 and November 13, depending on staffing and inventory considerations. Cornthwaite hopes that locals who have made it in over the years will stop in again before the last night of service — maybe even for a shot of Fernet and a Ramos Gin Fizz.