Before opening their doors, the owners of three new Durham bars considered the obvious route, then said: What if we didn’t?
Ragen Lowek and Andy Pruss saw the local craft beer scene frothing and opened a seltzer brewery instead. Mike Douglass spent years perfecting daiquiri recipes, then launched a downtown lounge that doesn’t serve them—yet. The Ibarra brothers—whose family has been building an empire of Mexican restaurants across the Triangle for over 30 years—just went French.
Why the departures? Each owner paid attention to what their specific locations called for and where trends were heading. Here’s how those bets are playing out at Fizzwerks, Primrose, and The Lenny.
Fizzwerks
Inside a former tile factory on the fringe of downtown Durham’s Government Services District, Fizzwerks is coded as a typical brewery: there’s trivia on Wednesdays, a shuffleboard table, exposed ductwork.
But the keg lines aren’t primarily running IPAs. They’re pumping alcoholic seltzer, brewed in-house with seasonal fruits.
“We couldn’t open another brewery without it being differentiated in some way because of, like, how many breweries there are here,” says Andy Pruss, who owns the spot with his wife, Ragen Lowek. “We saw gaps in what people were doing and thought we could fill in those gaps and do it a little better.”
Fizzwerks opened in March on Ramseur Street. Between the tables inside and on the rooftop deck, it seats 200, joining the area’s lineup of spots like Ponysaurus and Mezcalito that have become go-tos for large groups who can walk in and find a place to sit without a reservation.
The rotating seltzer flavors read like a farmers’ market haul: peach (using produce sourced from an orchard two hours south), melon mint (made with cantaloupes that accidentally sprouted in the duo’s home garden), blackberry-plum. Fizzwerks also brews hard root beer, a Delta-9 drink, and several nonalcoholic seltzers, including a ginger beer that just about punches you in the face. There are also a few local beers and an espresso martini on tap, and some standard domestic and imported cans of beer.
The food matches the light, fresh ethos of the drinks: dips (hummus, whipped ricotta and feta, labneh, roasted eggplant) served with regular or gluten-free bread; a chicken sandwich and a sloppy joe, both available with soy protein substitutes; several salads; and flatbreads.
“The theme for us, when we were building out this idea, was like, ‘You just got back from hiking, you want to have a beer, but you don’t want to be stuffed,’” Pruss says.
It’s a tightly executed vision. Pruss and Lowek are industry veterans who, in a quintessential food industry love story, met while working at Aramark 21 years ago. They’ve spent their careers bouncing around different gigs as “puddle jumpers, trying to get the biggest splash,” Pruss says. Lowek worked at coffee shops in the Philadelphia airport and opened a coffee shop in that city; Pruss managed restaurants on the Las Vegas strip and helmed a Vegas restaurateur’s New York expansion; both did catering stints at food service giants like Levy Restaurants.
Don’t mistake the healthful menu at Fizzwerks for asceticism. Pruss, who sports the textbook chef look of bald head and tattoo sleeves, loves burgers—it’s a bit of a sacrifice not having them on the menu, he says, but one he made for brand consistency. And some comfort foods did make their way on: pickle chips, “Chickie tendies,” and pierogi made fresh daily using a family recipe.
In its first few months of business, Fizzwerks has cultivated a Tuesday night Dungeons and Dragons crowd and seen the rooftop deck packed for DJ nights and private events. The ongoing challenge is getting locals to venture outside of their regular haunts, the couple says. Foot traffic tends to flow toward established spots.
“We actually get more people from Raleigh, because they’ll search for something on Google and we’ll pop up,” Pruss says.
With plans to collaborate with neighboring businesses on branding the district and events in the works, they’re betting on the long game.
Primrose
The wall art has an uncanny digital gloss: Taylor Swift is depicted as the “Mona Lisa,” Michael Jackson and Britney Spears as “American Gothic,” Walter White as Vincent van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat.”
Fake flowers hang from the ceiling. There are chartreuse accent walls and at least three different floral wallpaper patterns. The lampshades have fringe. Neon signs, including a flat image of a marble bust wearing light-up sunglasses and a cursive “We Drink and We Don’t Judge” slogan, trim the space. One bathroom is pink down to the toilet seat. The other features an ornate floor-to-ceiling mirror angled so you can see your whole body at all times.
Owner Mike Douglass estimates that about half of customers come to Primrose to drink and half come purely to take photos and leave.
“Durham is known for art and food,” Douglass says. “If you can create a beautiful piece of art, people are going to cherish it, whereas other places they’d probably just walk right by.”
Primrose opened in April on Main Street. The drinks, cocktails that lean sweet, share the space’s kitschy, internet-inflected sensibilities. “Becky with the Good Pear,” a reference to a Beyoncé song about cheating, blends pear vodka with vanilla and cinnamon. “Sippin’ on Some Sizzurp” nods to an early 2000s hip-hop classic about purple drank, though the syrup in question here is lavender simple, not cough.
It’s not quite the bar that Douglass originally envisioned. His journey to bar ownership started with teenage stubbornness: a young Douglass begged for years to try his great-aunt Flossie’s famous daiquiri, to no avail. At age 20, he recalls, he argued that if you counted his time in the womb, technically he’d been on the planet 21 years and was of legal drinking age; Flossie still said no.
Years later, recipe finally in hand, Douglass started tinkering with flavor variations, showing up to parties and game nights with test batches and stacks of rating cards. In 2018, he met Darryl Coleman, who had extensive event planning experience. The pair began to plot a frozen daiquiri bar.
But COVID hit as they were still scouting locations. Douglass kept his job in finance. When he and Coleman finally found their Main Street location, which previously housed an architecture firm, at the end of 2023, the concept had evolved from daiquiri bar to speakeasy to what it is now. Part of the issue was seasonality.
“The longevity of something that’s really more popular during the summer was not going to be sustainable,” says Douglass of the planned daiquiri focus.
The location also influenced the pivot—with lots of passersby, the owners wanted something that would stop people in their tracks. They hired an interior designer with bartending experience who turned their vision of something “beautiful and postable” into a maximalist wonderland.
“We wanted something that you could post online,” Douglass says. “Right now, we’re in an age of social media and things like that. The prime example of that is ‘I want something that I can post on my page that’s going to have the beautiful background, the beautiful this, the beautiful that.’”
Douglass still pays homage to his great-aunt on the menu with “Violets for Aunt Flossie,” a floral cocktail with gin, crème de violette, and fresh lemon. The name Primrose—a flower that, like a bar, blooms in low light—stuck through the bar’s respective concept changes.
As for the famous daiquiri that started it all? “I haven’t received her blessing to add her recipe to the menu,” Douglass says. “So I honored her with a cocktail for now, and I’ll make it a seasonal drink soon.”
The Lenny
From The Lenny’s rooftop roost, you can see Duke Chapel on the horizon, Durham Bulls Athletic Park spread out immediately below, and, on game nights, fireworks detonating just beyond the railing.
“It feels like you can reach out and grab one,” Angel Hernandez Gomez, the restaurant’s events manager, says of the fireworks.
The Lenny was conceived after the owners of 555 Mangum approached Joel and Charlie Ibarra about creating a restaurant concept for their towering office building’s crown jewel space. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Charlie says, and he and Joel—who, between the two of them, run Raleigh’s acclaimed Jose and Sons and Cuya Cocina Latina (formerly Cortez) and have a stake in spots like Chido Taco and La Rancherita—knew they wanted to do something different.
“We didn’t want to do Mexican again,” Charlie says. “We were thinking about the baseball. I was like, dude, what’s more American than baseball?”
But the dramatic setting also demanded something more than a simple American sports bar. The brothers ultimately landed on what Charlie describes as a contemporary French brasserie with “rock ‘n’ roll Americana and global touches.” The restaurant takes its name from Lenny Kravitz, the musician known for blending rock and funk with other genres.
“Sort of like how a rock ’n’ roll artist can wear a leather jacket one day and then another day throw on a mink coat—we were like, let’s not stick to one specific thing,” Charlie says.
That philosophy comes to life through the restaurant’s team: French chef Lotfi Ouaazizi, whose restaurant experience spans the European continent; Mexican Spanish chef Manny Rosales, who spent 16 years working in restaurants in New York City; and Hernandez Gomez, a fixture in the Durham bar scene who also owns his own private event bar service.
The bar, which smells of vanilla smoke and dehydrating oranges, features a wine program heavy on French varietals and craft cocktails inspired by the view. When it comes to the food, Ouaazizi says he channels the dexterity of the restaurant’s namesake.
“He’s crazy artistic,” he says of Kravitz. “It’s not just music—he’s doing modeling too, he does design. He’s really a complex guy.”
Bar snacks and small plates include a raw bar with oysters and crab claws, truffle Gruyère croquettes, patatas bravas, and panzanella salad. Mains, which range from lamb chop ratatouille to grilled hanger steak, are abundant in elements: the summer fettuccine—with pea pesto, zucchini, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, edible flowers, and microgreens—presents as though someone cupped their hands around a garden bed and gently transferred it onto a plate.
That expansive spirit extends to the clientele. On a given night, Durham Bulls fans decked out in merch might drink alongside newlyweds still in their courthouse attire, while DPAC-goers mingle with families and office workers from the building below.
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Bluesky or email [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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