High Bars, Low Profiles

A n unpresuming wine bar. A relaxing nightclub. An upscale dive.

Downtown Durham’s three newest bars are all a touch oxymoronic. More fun similarities: two of them are in basements, two are owned and/or bartended by sons of Durham’s Y2K fine dining scene, and none of them are centered around craft cocktails.

Here’s the lowdown on Delafia, Club ERA, and High Dive.

Delafia

1103 South Roxboro Street

Delafia owner Jesse Gerstl is surprised that more customers haven’t asked him what delafia means in the two months since he launched the wine bar on South Roxboro Street.

“I thought every person would ask,” Gerstl says.

He’s not mad about it. A hyperlocal slang term from the Tuscan town where Gerstl spent some years as a child, delafia, pronounced “della feeya,” doesn’t translate very well, anyway.

“It’s something you answer a comment or a question with,” Gerstl says, nebulously, when pressed to explain. His rationale for using it as a namesake is primarily that “it’s a pretty word,” and a personal one.

“It’s something all of my friends back home think is hilarious—that there’s a bar in North Carolina named Delafia,” Gerstl says.

In short: it’s best if you don’t overthink it.

The same goes for most everything about Delafia, which opened this July in a white brick building on South Roxboro Street, on the fringes of downtown. The bar’s focus is natural wine—the farm-to-table version of wine, essentially, made on a smaller scale and with minimal intervention—which might seem “a little different and out there,” Gerstl says. But you don’t need to be a connoisseur to enjoy it, and there’s no obligation for patrons to want to learn about what they’re drinking.

Delafia shares a building with a Pentecostal church and a tobacco store. Unlike Gerstl’s previous two bars—Peccadillo, in Carrboro, and Bar Lusconi, in Durham, which closed their doors on the same day in 2016 due to low foot traffic and financial issues—it does have signage, but it’s still fairly incognito. (Peccadillo was a speakeasy; the closest Bar Lusconi got to a sign was a business card hung from a string in the front window.)

The space previously housed a barber shop, and every day, at least one person walks in asking for a haircut, Gerstl says.

Inside, Delafia is split into two sections. To the right, there’s a bottle shop and a few armchairs and to the left, a commanding L-shaped bar and a few tables. The bar side opens out to a small fenced patio. In all, the space seats around 30 people.

Gerstl says he designed Delafia so it could be operated by one bartender. That bartender is currently Adam Sobsey, a longtime INDY contributor who spent years bartending at fine dining behemoths Nana’s and the now-closed Magnolia Grill in Durham.

Sobsey is happy to talk your ear off about natural wine (“A bit of the myth of natural winemaking is that you just take the grapes, crush them, and walk away for six months; it’s actually much more complicated than that,” he says)—but his main concern is making sure the customers feel comfortable.

“We can talk about the pros and the cons of all these decisions, and the grapes, and the land, and where it’s from and all that,” Sobsey continues. “But at the end of the day, with wine, if you like it, you like it. If you don’t like it, you don’t. We pour until we find something that people love.”

High Dive

101 West Main Street, Suite 102

“High Dive,” as a potential restaurant name, had been bouncing around Daniel Sartain’s head for years.

“The original incarnation was a restaurant that was going to have a high-end menu—oysters on the half shell, half bottles of Franciacorta, ceviche—and then a dive side, with chili dogs and stuff like that,” Sartain says.

Then in April, the cocktail bar Glori closed and freed up the basement on Main Street that previously housed the bar-meets-arcade, Quarter Horse. The space wasn’t right for a restaurant, but was primely situated across the street from Sartain’s two existing ventures, Bar Virgile and Annexe. Being below ground, it made sense for a dive-y vibe.

“When I saw on social media that our friends at Glori decided to shut it down,” Sartain says, “that very day, I called the landlords—I knew who they were—and said, ‘I’ll take it,’ and negotiated a strong lease.”

High Dive opened in late August. As the name maintains, “While it is a dive bar, it’s on the nicer side,” Sartain says. “We have nice things.”

Indeed, the offerings at High Dive come across as basic but also polished and intentional. A short cocktail list is carefully spelled out on a letter board behind the bar instead of being scrawled on a chalkboard (or left unstated) in typical dive fashion. The nachos come with liquid cheese sauce from one of those movie theater machines—and housemade pickled jalapeños from a neatly labeled Cambro.

The TVs mounted on the walls show sports matches and old movies in the afternoon (High Dive opens at 3 p.m.); after dark, all but one are turned off, and the one that stays on is queued to that YouTube video of a crackling fireplace. The foosball table, which Sartain bought from a guy in Indiana who also sold him the bar’s pool table and CD jukebox, has been doctored by Sartain, a self-described foosball nerd, to deliver a more enjoyable playing experience.

High Dive sort of evokes those times when you clean your apartment so rigorously ahead of having company that you need to stage some clutter so people don’t think you’re a serial killer, or that scene in The Incredibles when Dash, gifted with super speed, tries to run at a believably average pace at a track meet. That’s not to say High Dive feels inauthentic—just different, a little endearing.

Sartain managed a slew of fine dining establishments in the Triangle—Magnolia Grill, Nana’s, One—before opening Bar Virgile and Annexe, both of which are fairly upscale. High Dive has been a big shift, he says.

“We are in FITFO mode,” he says, raising his hand. He puts down a finger for each word of the acronym: “Figure, it, the, fuck, out.”

Club ERA

305 South Dillard Street

“I wanted to give homage to those who came before us—all of the beautiful queer and trans people who were the foundation to creating queer space—and say, ‘We’re creating a new era, but with you in mind and standing on your shoulders,’” says Triangle drag queen Naomi Dix.

That’s part of where the “era” in Club ERA, the nightclub Dix launched in July, comes from. But the name also reflects the layout of the sprawling basement space the club occupies. Along the sides of the club’s long central dance floor, there are doors to different rooms, or “eras,” Dix says, with installations by local artists. Current rooms include a cotton-ceilinged, mirror-walled “cloud chamber” and a “tree sanctuary” with vine-covered walls, anchored by a life-size tree sculpture.

“To be able to come into these different rooms and relax and get away from everything, but still feel the presence and the energy from the dance floor, was really key to me,” Dix says. “I think that’s something that’s missing in a lot of bars and nightclubs.”

A Durham native who spent a decade on the road as a drag performer, and who for the past several years has served as co-director of Durham’s Pride festival, Dix’s main goal in opening Club ERA was to create a venue with representation both on stage and behind the scenes.

“When I was traveling and doing drag full time, in many of these spaces that I was performing in, I saw the lack of representation when it came to those who were in charge,” Dix says. “These were men, and/or these were white men, that didn’t necessarily understand the depths of drag culture. They understood it from the perspective of an observer, but they didn’t understand it from the perspective of an actual entertainer and artist.”

In practice, cultivating an inclusive nightclub starts with the staffing, says Dix, who avoids hiring based on conventional ideas of attractiveness and focuses instead on representation across body types, skin tones, and gender identities when bringing on bartenders, go-go dancers, and DJs. When the people running the back end are valued, the rest follows, Dix says.

Club ERA is open five nights a week, with themed programming like “Big Kid Uno” on Wednesdays and Thursdays and DJ sets and drag shows on the weekends.

This month, the “pink velvet” room—a cozy, burlesque-inspired space that Dix says is all about sexual expression and providing a safe space for that exploration—will open just in time for Pride.

Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on X or send an email to lgeller@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com

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