Photo by Keith Isaacs
Foundation Anniversary Party
May 29, 6 p.m.
Foundation, 213 Fayetteville Street, Raleigh
You’ll only notice the red glow on Fayetteville Street—the neon sign directing you down fifteen stairs that lead to a tight basement that used to be a crawlspace before a builder and an architect decided to realize their vision for what a cocktail bar could be.
There, you’ll find an intimate and expertly designed establishment that, over the last decade, has become a bedrock of the downtown Raleigh drinking experience.
In the spring of 2009, Raleigh-based builder Will Alphin and architect Vincent Whitehurst opened Foundation. They’d been working together on a renovation of 213 Fayetteville and became intrigued by the foundation work they encountered during the building’s excavation, which began in 2006. As they dug through the craggy rock, they wondered what could fill the space below the space they were tasked with renovating.
The exposed brick and stone, as well as the wooden beams running across the ceiling, suggested one thing: a bar.
Neither had a background in mixology, but they had an interest, and they saw a chance to bring a nascent scene to Raleigh—and to be at the forefront of DTR’s renaissance.
From the outset, Alphin and Whitehurst decided that Foundation would focus on locally sourced cocktails and beers and wines native to North Carolina. Alphin’s logic: “You don’t go to McDonald’s if you are in Mexico. You want that authentic local thing that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Ten years on, Foundation, which barely holds fifty people, has become a fixture on Fayetteville Street. To mark the anniversary, the owners compiled FOUNDATION: The First Ten Years, 2009–2019. Something of a coffee-table (or, perhaps, a bar-top) book, it celebrates what Foundation has meant to its owners, its staff, its barflies, and the city at large, and seeks to tell the bar’s story through the tales, legends, and whiskey-tinged memories of the people who know it best.
Alphin describes the book as “a high school yearbook that meets an issue of [celebrity chef David Chang’s food and literary magazine] Lucky Peach.”
With contributions from several Raleigh staples, FOUNDATION paints a picture of a bar that is more clubhouse than company, more refuge than rathskeller.
“From falling in love to grieving a loss, Foundation has always been a friend and canvas for life’s sacred moments,” writes Brewery Bhavana co-owner Vansana Nolintha.
“I’m a better person for those fifteen steps to Foundation,” writes Fullsteam founder Sean Lilly Wilson.
Tales of a twice-broken heart by an anonymous contributor, brief musings on the bar’s role in blossoming love affairs with bourbon, and simple stories of endless subterranean nights litter FOUNDATION’s pages, along with a collection of the poems the bar began including in its menus in 2013 and a smattering of essays by local writers.
Beyond the memories, FOUNDATION includes recipes of popular drinks and a cheeky rundown of the bar’s drink options, listed alphabetically. It’s also packed with both professionally shot photos and pictures snapped on phones by imbibers, artwork created by the bar’s staff and regulars, and hand-drawn cocktail-napkin doodles.
If anything becomes evident over the book’s pages, it’s how bars often become so much more than a place to get a drink, how they become part of the very fabric of not only the cities in which they exist, but of the people who call those cities home.
More than an homage, FOUNDATION is a reminder that our favorite places—those willing to accept us at our best and our worst—are always there waiting for us.
Support independent journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
