First time visitors would be forgiven for thinking it was a storm shelter entrance. Looking it up on Google Maps takes you a full block away, into a dead end alley. The address should be right here though. You take your first steps down timidly — like you’re trespassing.
There’s a busy street right above you. You can hear music, laughter, cars… but as you descend this staircase it feels old, dangerous, secret. Crumbling steps reveal older stone, brick — layers upon layers.
John Brown’s Underground isn’t advertised like a traditional business. A tiny sign stands 30 feet high on the alley at the corner. Small, missable.There’s no fancy branding at the bottom of the stairwell leading to the bar either, just a simple chalk sign letting you know you’re where you are supposed to be.
Heavy, wet basement air hits you as you step out of the hot Kansas wind. It’s like a portal to a different time. You walk down that staircase and back to an echo of the frontier.
It was here that I met Dante Colombo, manager of John Brown’s Underground, to discuss the bar, its culture, and unconventional paths that sometimes lead to unprecedented success.
“What I love about this job is the being on a stage part of it, kind of just paying a role. The role we play is different every night, depending on what we’re doing and how the day goes.”
-Dante Colombo
But I’m not the only one who’s found their way here. John Brown’s Underground has started to make a splash on the national cocktail bar scene. This year they were recognized as a James Beard semi-finalist and worldwide buzz is starting to build… sign or no.
Speakeasies may not come to mind when you think of Kansas, but drinking culture has a complex history here. Kansas was the first state to enact prohibition in 1881. Enforcement was particularly weak in those early days, leading to a robust but dangerous network of bootleg suppliers and underground dives.
It was here that Carry Nation, icon of the temperance movement picked up her hatchet to start smashing up speakeasies dressed in her Sunday best.
Kansas City straddles Missouri and Kansas as a regional trade hub. That unique location brought organized crime, and made it the ideal place for dry Kansans to wet their whistles, even before the rest of the country went dry with the 18th Amendment in 1920.
During prohibition, major Kansas City institutions like The Muehlebach Brewing Company, Heim Brewing, and the J Rieger & Co Distillery had to close their doors, but the speakeasies lived on. A honeycomb of limestone tunnels under Kansas City housed hidden alehouses and gin joints. When J Rieger was building their revived facilities in KC’s West Bottoms area ten years ago, they discovered a 400-foot limestone tunnel, implying the greats of the era may not have gone so quietly.
That past lingers 30 miles west of Kansas City in Lawrence, Kansas, home of John Brown’s Underground.
“ A lot of the magic of this place is because it is here… people come back and visit and they recognize us."
The City of Lawrence was founded in 1854 with the explicit purpose of establishing Kansas as a free state. Following the Kansas-Nebraska Act, new states were supposed to vote on whether slavery was permitted within their bounds. As the pro-slavery Missourians began to flow in, the abolitionists (including the bar’s namesake,John Brown) poured into Lawrence and the surrounding areas to fight slavery.
This town was the Free State capital, the hub for the low-grade war that preceded the national Civil War. John Brown worked against slavery in Kansas long before he would become known for attempting to start a slave revolt in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. After a pro-slavery militia raided Lawrence in 1856, John Brown, five of his sons, and three other Lawrence residents hunted down five pro-slavery advocates who had taken part in the attack.
The Pottawatomie Massacre, as it came to be called, kicked off fighting throughout the East end of the state. Pro-slavery Missourians pushed to make Kansas a slave state, while abolitionist “Jayhawkers” like John Brown opposed them.
Today, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in Lawrence that isn’t incredibly proud of this legacy. They still consider themselves Jayhawkers. The University of Kansas’s mascot is a Jayhawk. The Free State Festival happens every year. Free State Brewing is one of the most prominent local businesses. Children graduate from Free State High School.
This was a town founded to take a stand, and that attitude is still present. Alt culture and activism feature prominently. There’s few other small towns where you can see punk kids, metalheads, and the overall-clad bluegrass crowd all rubbing shoulders.
Founded in 2014, John Brown’s Underground was originally designed to be a high end bar and grill rather than a cocktail venue. Strict Lawrence city ordinances at the time forced establishments that served liquor to make over half their revenue on food, which is a much lower margin business. Their model wasn’t working under such pressure, so they needed to get creative.
The team opened a Breakfast Bar in the space above the Underground as a place to grab fancy cereal and coffee. This enabled them to run both entities on the same license and meet regulatory requirements.
“It made it possible to do what I wanted to do down here. To really go headfirst into this more creative cocktail endeavor. Our trajectory evolved… we started to think more about conceptual menus and what that may look like”
A drink from one of the bar’s latest menus — themed around all things classified, conspiracy, and cryptid.
Each cocktail menu at John Brown’s Underground (fondly referred to as JBUG by the staff) is totally original. All new recipes, all new offerings, all new art, all new themes. Every few months, the team closes the bar for a week to retrain and experiment. Local artists contribute to beautiful, unique menu designs.
There are some common threads, but every menu means hours of artistic exploring, reading, imagining, and tasting. This makes every time you visit JBUG a totally unique experience.
It’s a massive undertaking, and I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. You have to make sure you can execute the ideas you’ve been working on.
The pandemic hit Lawrence like a ton of bricks, but it too helped shape the cocktail culture.
To comply with the new regulations, Dante shifted to only allowing pre-reserved groups. The team sectioned off multiple private rooms and separated tables, then encouraged groups to reserve 2-hour blocks for their visits.
This was surprise magic. While limiting the ability to spontaneously drop in, this time pressure created the feeling of an exclusive “cocktail experience”. Grab two hours of time, order a few drinks, go enjoy the rest of your night and carry that magic from JBUG with you back up into the surface world.
As we talked about the history of The Underground, Dante started to open up to me about his own history.
Lawrence is a small town. Dante was born here, and never thought he’d stay. He worked hard in school, getting both economics and finance degrees. But something felt off when he entered the workforce at a Kansas City corporate internship.
“No one majors in finance to not make a ton of money. I thought that’s what I wanted. Actually doing it…
I remember going to eat lunch in my car and crying. ‘I’m going to go sit in there and pretend to work at a desk for another 4 hours?’ I couldn’t wait to go to my other job… where I could move around and creatively problem solve.”
I found myself trying to envision Dante filling out spreadsheets behind a desk. Imagining him in an office was a struggle. After seeing his smile as he describes the construction of cocktails or the triumphs of his staff, I’m just not sure how someone like this could be caged in that way.
Running a bar isn’t easy — particularly a high-end cocktail bar in a fairly downturned midwest college town. Under Dante’s leadership, JBUG has grown in popularity and Dante himself has come into his own.
It does seem like John Brown’s Underground and Dante found exactly what they needed in each other.
You can’t interview a man without asking a question or two so ridiculous it makes him blush. So, if Dante were a cocktail, what would he be? Surprisingly, he had an answer right away:
“A Jungle Bird. It’s a modern classic, first made in Kuala Lumpur. It’s Jamaican Rum, lime juice, Compari, typically some sort of syrup, shaken. Perfectly balanced… a little sour, a little sweet. I say that because the cocktail that we’ve become most famous — the one people most often come back to — is ‘Let Me Be Clear’. Our take on a Jungle Bird that I first did in 2018.”
His voice slightly hesitated at the word “famous”.
Fame is definitely on the menu here; I ask Dante about his success:
“It’s weird to be compared to your heroes. It’s a relatively small community. Fancy cocktail bar is a weird subset of the overall bar community. When you live in the bubble for so long you get this weird tunnel vision, but we’re really good at what we do and we’ve had a lot of practice.”
Yes, there’s more buttoned up cocktail lounges out there. There’s places that charge $40 a drink compared to JBUG’s $13 a pop. I don’t think there’s anywhere that I’ve had such a unique cocktail experience like this though.
Here, there’s a personal touch from a small and passionate team. An original menu and theme every time. A timeless frontier speakeasy aesthetic that is uniquely Lawrence. Every drink is custom crafted, with thought, care, and soul put into it.
That is something that will keep me coming back underground.
…Well, that and their Japanese whiskey highballs.
