Tonic

Most bars acquire a stage. Somebody clears a corner, moves two tables, and a guitarist stands where the tables were. Tonic was built the other way round. When Winston Greene opened it on East Water Street in 2017, he put a small proscenium arch over the bar itself and set the performance space underneath it. “The bar is the stage,” he said at the time. “It’s right under the arch.”

2017

Greene came up through the Santa Fe bar trade, at Rouge Cat, at Eloisa and Bar Alto, and at Low ‘n Slow, before taking the space at 103 East Water Street, next door to Cafe Pasqual’s. What he built there was small, dark, and pointedly not of this city.

The scheme is 1920s: Art Deco line and geometry, in sapphire blue, gold, and white. Deco in the twenties borrowed hard from Egypt, from ocean liners, and from the machine age, and it is a vocabulary with no natural relationship to Santa Fe whatsoever. This is a town whose downtown has spent a century enforcing adobe on everything that goes up in it. Walking off Water Street into blue and gold is a small, deliberate shock, and it is the first thing the bar tells you about its intentions.

The Bar Is the Stage

Greene’s reasoning about intimacy was specific rather than sentimental. The best jazz bars, he argued when he opened, are the ones where people sit close enough together to be slightly in each other’s way. So the stage is sized for a trio, a quartet at the outside, and it sits over the bar rather than across from it, which means the musicians and the drinks occupy the same few feet. Loren Bienvenu took the music direction at the start.

Everything else follows from that constraint. A place built for four musicians cannot be built for a hundred customers, and Tonic has never pretended otherwise. The cocktail programme is seasonal and changes often, in the manner of bars where somebody is paying attention rather than executing a manual, and the food is deliberately secondary to it.

Where the Music Went

Here is the part that most listings have not caught up with. Tonic is described almost everywhere online as a jazz bar, which is what it was designed to be and what it was for years. Its own website currently states that it is not hosting live music or jazz events at this time.

Both things can be true, and the sentence worth holding onto is the first one. The arch is still over the bar. The stage is still the size of a quartet. The room was shaped by a question about music and cannot be un-shaped, whatever is or is not scheduled this season. Anyone going specifically for a set should check with the bar first, which is good practice everywhere and essential here.

Water Street

Tonic is a Plaza-adjacent bar, which in Santa Fe is a smaller category than it sounds. Most of the drinking that gets recommended to visitors happens somewhere else: La Reina out on Cerrillos Road, As Above, So Below down in the Railyard, Farm Shop Norte a block north. Tonic is the one you can reach on foot from the Plaza without deciding to go anywhere, which makes it a first drink before dinner at The Compound or a last one after the opera has sent everybody back into town at midnight.

Santa Fe is not, on the whole, a late city. Tonic was built by somebody who wished it were.

Common Questions

Who owns Tonic in Santa Fe?

Winston Greene, a bartender who worked at Rouge Cat, at Eloisa and Bar Alto, and at Low ‘n Slow before opening Tonic at 103 East Water Street in 2017.

Does Tonic have live jazz?

It was designed as a jazz bar, with a small stage built over the bar, and it is still described that way in most listings. Tonic’s own website says it is not currently hosting live music or jazz. Check with the bar before going for a set.