Eve, a new downtown Durham bar themed around a reclaimed, feminist Garden of Eden, has something of a creation mythology of its own.
The bar’s owners, Uma Ramiah and Jessica “Bre” Breland, originally hired contractors to build out the space at 108 East Parrish Street, a deep storefront with high ceilings and exposed brick. But the contractors “just kept not getting it right,” Ramiah and Breland said. So the two women, along with their friend Ariana Serrano—a tattoo artist who works upstairs—took the process into their own hands.
“We got to a point where we just pushed the guys out,” Breland said of the contractors, “and did it ourselves.”
The resulting space is lush, textured, and libraryesque. Tall wooden shelves, filled with bottles and books and accessible by a rolling ladder, tower behind the bar. Dramatic curtains frame the front windows. Potted plants spill from shelves and side tables. Two thick wooden slabs form the bar top, joined down the center by a channel of clear resin embedded with dried flowers, ferns, butterflies, and snake skeletons. The resin pour took about six weeks, Ramiah said—she sourced the botanicals and layered them in between rounds of pouring and curing.
Eve opened at the end of February and is now open Wednesday through Sunday. The bar regularly hosts its own events (it held a day party for International Women’s Day on Sunday, for one) and is also available for private rentals.
Ramiah and Breland teamed up several years ago when Ramiah was working as an event planner, staging functions like VIP dinners at Dreamville. Breland, meanwhile, had just retired after a decade in the WNBA, after most recently playing for the Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury. The duo began hosting their own events together at places like Primrose and the Unscripted Hotel—day parties, mostly, aimed at women in their thirties and forties who wanted to dress up and dance without the scene being too loud or too late. The events built a following, and the two eventually started looking for a space of their own.
Eve is open to all, Ramiah and Breland said, but is soundly woman-centered. This focus is reflected across aspects of the bar, from its programming—on Wednesday nights, the bar invites local female entrepreneurs, artists, and comedians to share their work, with half-price bottles of wine—to its sourcing, which prioritizes women-owned producers.
Then there’s the name. Eve, in the biblical telling, took the fall for all of humanity, and women have been hearing about it ever since. Naming a woman-owned bar after her felt like a way to flip the script, Breland and Ramiah said.
“Thinking of women, you cannot not think of Eve. We just wanted to reclaim the name.”
jessica beland, co-owner, Eve
“Thinking of women, you cannot not think of Eve,” Breland said. “We just wanted to reclaim the name.”
The biblical serpent is also a running motif at the bar, turning up as small gold purse hooks beneath the counter and on the cocktail menu as a smoky mezcal margarita called the Serpentine.
Other house cocktails include the Night Orchard, a bitter, aperitif-driven riff on a Negroni, and the Kamala, a floral daiquiri made with cachaça and lavender chrysanthemum cordial. Eve also offers wine, beer, and nonalcoholic options.
The space previously housed Atomic Fern, a board game bar that closed at the start of the pandemic. The neighboring restaurant, Littler, which closed last year, had been using it for storage until Eve came along.
This is Ramiah and Breland’s first time owning a bar, and while they did ditch their contractors, they didn’t build Eve in isolation. Gray Brooks, who owns Pizzeria Toro and owned Littler, has helped them understand their building’s electrical quirks. Owners and managers from places like Goorsha, M Sushi, Kingfisher, and Counting House stopped by with moral support, equipment, and plumber recommendations, they say.
Customers have been helping to shape the space too, bringing in books, plants, and records to spin at a wood-paneled DJ booth that Breland built. Breland and Ramiah said they want patrons to feel some sense of coauthorship over Eve.
“Bars are nice and bars are fine and bars are fun,” Ramiah said. “But do people feel like it’s theirs? Do they feel like it’s made for them?”
There’s an art piece currently in the works for the bar that will build on that ethos of communal creation. It’s a framed print that says “Eve was …”. Put the words and the frame together and you get “Eve was … framed.” Read the print as a prompt, and it becomes something to linger on over a Serpentine.
“She’s this incredibly mythic figure, and people have been telling her story in different ways for thousands of years,” Ramiah said. “We want people to have those conversations.
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