From basement dive to dreamy cocktail bar, a look at a top Raleigh chef’s latest

In the quiet afternoon before Sous Terre opens, you can hear the creak of footsteps overhead as the French bistro Jolie prepares for the night’s dinner service. It’s like sitting inside a secret beneath the streets of Raleigh, wrapped in brick and wood and leather.

Sous Terre opened this month in Raleigh as the sixth concept from chef Scott Crawford. It’s his first cocktail bar.

It is not a speakeasy, but it might be the closest thing that exists in the Triangle, accessed by a need-to-know door on Pace Street, down a flight of stairs to a single dark room under Crawford’s first two Raleigh restaurants, Jolie and Crawford & Son.

“We’re low-key,” said Crawford, sitting at the end of a long leather banquette.

Sous Terre, which means “underground” in French, transformed the former Atlantic Lounge, the bar founded by Cardinal owner Jason Howard. Crawford said he had been exploring spaces throughout Raleigh for a cocktail bar and one day Howard called and offered to sell his.

“Sous Terre is born out of a curiosity that (beverage director) Jordan Joseph and I had for creating an intimate cocktail bar in Raleigh,” Crawford said. “We looked at spaces all over the city....Our idea was to create a space that would be warm, intimate and focus on classic cocktails.”

For the tiny cocktail lounge, Crawford stripped down the Atlantic Lounge interior, exposing brick on the walls, installing a sleek, black marble bar and a row of curved-back stools.

The key is key

The Atlantic Lounge was famous as the “key bar,” operating as a private club, which members could get into with their own key. Sous Terre keeps that tradition alive and honors the keys of former Atlantic Lounge members.

To get into Sous Terre you can buy a key and lifetime membership for $50 or you can dine at Crawford & Son or Jolie and ask for a pass down to the bar after the meal.

“It’s an amenity to the restaurants or it’s your own private club,” Crawford said. “The key gives people the feeling that it’s their space. ... We liked that concept. It gives keyholders or guests a sense of exclusivity, a sense of place, that it belongs to them.”

Feel the cold

Jordan Joseph is beverage director of Crawford Hospitality, overseeing the drink lists at all of Crawford’s restaurants. But Sous Terre is a personal project. He was behind the bar opening night, he wrote the cocktail menu, and he and his family helped demo and build the bar with Crawford during the construction phase.

One of the coldest drinks on the menu is the highball made with Japanese whiskey kept at exactly zero degrees and served in a glass that is exactly zero degrees, then jolted with soda water at 36 degrees. Joseph sources ice from a vendor who freezes it in 300-pound hunks and sculpts it into crystal clear cubes and blocks. In the highball, a long block of ice just about the length of the glass disappears in the cocktail.

“You get this unctuous texture to it,” Joseph said. “The whiskey tastes like milk chocolate and roasted barley. When you drink it, it has this almost cream soda effect.”

Joseph said that is all owed to the temperature of the ingredients playing off of one another — an element he said Sous Terre features on its menu.

“We’re taking temperature about as seriously as we can possibly take temperature,” Joseph said.

Shaken and shaken and shaken ...

On the first night it opened, Sous Terre ran out of eggs.

The culprit was the surprise hit of the night, the Ramos Gin Fizz — a classic cocktail made with gin, cream, an egg white and citrus juices. It’s the kind of cocktail that helped kick off the country’s cocktail bar revival a couple decades ago, combining the pageantry of mixing ingredients and shaking and creating something astounding.

In this case, Joseph dry-shakes the ingredients for a few minutes, whipping the egg white and cream into a stiff froth, then pours it into a frozen glass and pops it all back into the freezer for several minutes. It takes a long time to make, which is why Joseph said many bars leave it off their menus.

“No one else puts it on their menu — they know better,” he said. “I feel bad when people have to wait but that’s just the nature of the drink. I have to say, ‘I’m sorry, this drink takes forever, but I think you’re going to love it.’”

To complete the Ramos Gin Fizz, Joseph takes the drink out of the freezer, pokes a hole in the now-stiff head that’s formed and fills it with club soda. The cream rises above the rim of the glass like a crown.

“I think it’s cool that we’re doing it because everyone else is scared to do it,” Joseph said.

... and stirred

Joseph admits that when he visits a bar for the first time he’s probably ordering a beer, trying to keep things simple and reliable. His go-to cocktail, though, is the classic negroni, a stirred concoction of gin, sweet vermouth and Campari — as bittersweet as they come.

Joseph said he hopes Sous Terre can help showcase the classics in new ways.

“It’s a love project for us,” he said. “I wanted to show my favorite classic cocktails. Every single week we’ll seek out new stuff on the shelves and have a new menu monthly. ... Over the years, I’ve learned to be creative and do different techniques and all this fun stuff. But every time I go out, I want something simple. I’m not saying these drinks are simple, they’re pretty far from simple, but they read simple.”

Crawford corner

With Sous Terre, Crawford now has three concepts in about a quarter-block radius, side by side and stacked on top of each other.

Acclaimed as one of the South’s top chefs for decades now, Crawford has branched out with restaurants across the Triangle, but has carved a special place in the Person Street corridor. His flagship restaurant Crawford & Son is a finalist this year for the Outstanding Hospitality James Beard Award, a national honor.

“We feel and have always felt this is one of the coolest little corners in Raleigh,” Crawford said. “When we came here, there wasn’t a whole lot here. We still thought it was a great feel and our goal was just to elevate that. ... What (Sous Terre) means, it just adds another layer to that. We have this basement bar — it’s part of our brand, it offers more for the neighborhood.”