Double A, the much-anticipated lounge beneath Mercadito, is set to open November 12 at 8pm. Last week, I spoke with the club’s cocktail consultants, Tad Carducci and Paul Tanguay—a.k.a. the Tippling Bros—to find out everything I could about the bar. Read the excerpts from the interview to find out what’s in store.

How the Tippling Bros assembled an all-star bartending staff—and why those mixologists aren’t (yet) designing their own drinks

JK: We have a pretty small cocktail community in Chicago. When you went about assembling the team of bartenders at Mercadito, you definitely took some of the best bartenders in the city.
Tad Carducci: Yes, we did.
Paul Tanguay: Absolutely.

JK: What was your thinking behind that?
TC: First and foremost, it wasn’t to try to poach anybody from anywhere. I had personal relationships with basically everybody on the team, and months and months and months ago, we started planting the seed, saying, we’d love for you to come and help us out. And when we let people know that we were finally ready and looking, everybody that we opened with came to us and said, “Yeah, we absolutely want to come and work with you.”

JK: Did the two of you come up with all of the cocktails at Mercadito, or was it a collaboration?
TC: We came up with the opening cocktails—that was all us. Part of the reason we hired the team that we did was so that we develop the opening list, kind of to establish the Mercadito culture on the drinks side, and then the idea being to slowly give ownership to the team, utilizing their creativity. Our next menu changes will have more contributions from the bartenders. We’ll always maintain probably at least half of the cocktails on the list, but then leaving probably the other half for the bartenders to play around with and really get creative.
PT: In terms of building a team, if bartenders contribute to the menu, they feel like they’re part of it—they take ownership of it a little bit more.

Tad Carducci

Everything you want to know about Double A, or, the risks of opening a bar without a bar
JK: So is that the same team that will go to execute the cocktails at Double A?
TC: Yes, primarily.

JK: What’s the cocktail list like at Double A?
TC: Double A’s going to be interesting. At Mercadito, the focus is all agave spirits—tequila and mezcal. Double A, while it’s a tequila lounge, will be much more varied as far as spirits categories go. So we’ll have rum, we’ll have gin, we’ll have vodka cocktails. We’ll keep the menu down there a lot smaller—maybe between five and ten selections on the menu, and then we’ll have what we call “Dealer’s Choice,” or bartender’s choice cocktails every night to foster a lot more creativity with the bartenders and to allow our repeat guests to walk in, and if they don’t feel like looking at a menu, they don’t have to. We will be doing some bottle service as well, but we’re taking kind of a unique spin. Instead of offering the standard bottle-service presentation, we will offer freshly made mixes to be served with the bottles, so that, if somebody, let’s say, orders a bottle of tequila, they’ll get a freshly made cocktail that just needs to be assembled at the table.

JK: I heard the cocktails will be made table-side. Is that only for bottle service, or is that for all the drinks?
TC: It will primarily be for bottle service. I think the layout of the space is so unique that basically, every person that’s in the lounge—whether they’re sitting or standing—has a very intimate relationship with the bartender. So it’s almost as if all of the cocktails are being made tableside because it’s so small and because the bar is kind of built inside out, so everybody’s got a bird’s-eye view, got a vantage point onto the bar.

JK: What does it mean that it’s built “inside out”?
PT: There’s no bar!
TC: Our bar is basically a very long sort of work table that extends out of the wall into the center of the room, and the bar stations are built on the outside, so that you have two bartenders, one on either side of the table, who work facing each other. So basically all the seating is built around this communal table. So you could theoretically be standing next to the bartender as he makes your drink—immediately right next to him.

JK: Is that a set-up you guys have done before in New York?
TC: Oh no no no, this is unique to Double A, and it’s something we worked and worked and worked on, and there was a lot of going back and forth like, “Are we out of our minds?” “Is this going to work?,” because it presents some unique service issues. However, we took a leap of faith and we built this this way, and what we’ll need to do is very quickly establish the, the—
PT: The culture.
TC: The culture—not so much rules and regulations—but kind of the culture, the etiquette of Double A, meaning, although we foster that intimacy of standing next to the bartender, anybody who tries to interfere, let’s say, will be frowned upon.

JK: Interfere meaning….?
TC: Meaning try to grab a bottle, try to do something like that.
PT: Touching the bartender—
TC: In inappropriate ways, unless of course the bartender appreciates it. There is no room for us to tolerate [that], so that will be established right off the bat. But I think it will present a much more intimate experience for the guests.

Paul Tanguay

The Tippling Bros’ take on the Chicago cocktail scene
JK: Have you been drinking anywhere else in the city?
TC: We prefer to call that research. We have been researching in other places, and we’ll be doing some more research this evening: Violet Hour, Drawing Room, Crimson Lounge, Delilah’s.

JK: That’s all tonight?
TC: Potentially.

JK: Well have a good time, and thanks for calling.
TC: Thanks for talking to us. We’re so excited, and it’s tremendously rewarding to see what the reception has been so far for Mercadito.

JK: We don’t have a lot of ”scene” kind of places in Chicago I don’t think, so when a place like Mercadito opens here, you know, it’s a big deal.
TC: It’s funny, for us, being involved with it, we never thought of Mercadito as being a scene.  We thought of it being a great restaurant with a great bar, and we were, I think, all of us involved —not just Paul and I—were thrown for a loop initially when we opened at just how busy we were getting. I don’t think I ever expected that on any given night we would sell 400 margaritas, 300 of another of our signature cocktails, and a couple hundred of each other one. I think last week we sold 1,000 plus just straight margaritas. On top of all of our other signature cocktails. So it’s presented some challenges for us, in keeping the balance between our craft and what we do and volume.

JK: Are there things that you’ve had to change?
TC: There’s things that we’ve had to adjust, yes, in order to make service faster and consistent and not have the service bartender want to stab me in the heart.

Double A, 108 W. Kinzie St, (312-329-2444). Wed–Fri 8pm–2am; Sat 8pm–3am.