Photograph by Phil Armstrong
The story of New Richmond Tavern starts as many do—with a couple of friends sitting together and asking a question that many people have thought at one time or another: “Should we open our own bar?” For co-owners Maggie Huntwork, Mike Huntwork, and Rod Crousey, the answer was “yes.”
Located next door to the New Richmond Distilleries, the tavern was built from the ground up before opening in June with an array of cocktails featuring spirits from the distillery on its menu. It builds on the momentum the area has seen since the distillery reopened in 2017. (It continues the tradition of using locally grown agricultural ingredients for its spirits, a process that dates back to when the distillery was originally founded in 1835.)
“There aren’t many restaurants or bars here,” Maggie says. “There’s probably, like, three or four bars and no one was really doing a big cocktail feature, so knowing we had our spirits, we knew we really wanted to focus on the cocktails, which then gave a little bit of an upscale vibe to the place, but we didn’t want it to come off as not approachable. We wanted to be this place where anybody could feel comfortable going in, knowing it’s one of the only places around where they could go get a craft cocktail.”
Photograph by Phil Armstrong
Maggie worked in the service industry as a waitress for 15 years through high school, college, and a master’s program before becoming a brand strategist. When construction on the bar was almost completed back in January, she realized that someone needed to step in and take control of the day-to-day operations of owning a bar, like getting vendors, crafting the cocktail list, hiring, training, and much more. With Mike and Crousey not having enough time due to their full-time engineering jobs and her wanting to get back into the customer service industry, she decided she should be the one to step down from her corporate job.
“I just jumped right back in,” Maggie says. “It’s so fun getting to know new people every day and talking to strangers that then become regulars and friends. It’s very exciting to not know where your day’s going to go all the time.
“When I was doing brand strategy, I was doing everything from developing who we’re going to go after for a brand or what the next innovation is going to be, what we’re going to talk about to get people to buy the brand,” she recalls. “Everything I used to do in my corporate roles, I’m utilizing now. I don’t think I put that together when I was quitting that job, but I use those skills day in and day out.”
Photograph by Phil Armstrong
Another skill that Maggie brings to this role is the ability to create local partnerships, which is a large part of New Richmond Tavern’s identity. Besides its partnership with New Richmond Distillery, the bar recently partnered with its neighbor Wholy Beans, using the coffee shop’s nitro cold brew to craft an espresso martini.
“It’s like the perfect amount of froth and the perfect flavor,” she notes. “It goes so well with our craft vodka because it doesn’t have any sort of lingering finish to it. That’s my absolute favorite.”
In addition, the bar is hosting food truck pop-ups every weekend through the end of the summer. So far, they have had Little Hill Pizza, Hi-Mark, Schmidt’s Sausage Haus, and more serving by the riverside where patrons can walk around, stop by a food truck, sit on the patio, and enjoy its drinks in New Richmond’s DORA status.
The tavern is adding many more weekly events to its calendar, like trivia, mixtape bingo and a couple more that are still being workshopped. Maggie is hoping that the bar will bring people to explore New Richmond.
“People are coming down and discovering the area for the first time, which I think is really great for the village of New Richmond,” she says. “The more people that we can get down there, the more businesses we can have that can really bring in people to spend a day down there and really check it out. Everybody knows OTR. Everybody knows Hyde Park. Everybody knows West Chester. But there’s so many little great areas within this area of Cincinnati that I think are hidden gems that people don’t know about.”
New Richmond Tavern, 218 Front St., New Richmond, (513) 594-8018
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