Sam Nelis has been hosting Friday night cocktail pop-ups in his café-bar-beverage market in Winooski for well over a year. As of this weekend, customers can enjoy the Specs bar seven nights a week.
On Sunday, November 16, Nelis will pull back the curtain — which has been hiding his largely DIY construction project since the back wall came down in the spring — and host the bar’s grand opening from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. The celebration will feature all-day lineup of live music and DJs to accompany the new cocktail menu.
Nelis opened Specs at 7 West Canal Street in December 2023, first as a café serving coffee, tea and espresso drinks such as the Rotary Rose. The attached retail shop followed in May 2024, with educational workshops and the Friday cocktails soon after. The space remained open while Nelis built the 10-seat bar.
Now, he’s realizing the full Specs vision: a café-bar open morning ’til night. The coffee drinks remain the same, and are joined by a menu of 10 to 15 daytime cocktails, Nelis said. At 4 p.m., the full cocktail menu will be available with “many, many more,” he said, starting with around 100 classics.
Housemade ingredients including fresh-squeezed juices and crystal-clear ice will star in drinks such as Manhattans; mojitos; 50/50 martinis; tropical piña coladas, mai tais and blue Hawaiians; cosmopolitans; lemon drops; Moscow mules; and the vermouth-forward Adonis and bamboo. For each, the menu will list the bar’s “specs,” or detailed recipe specifications.
“If you’re a cocktail bar, a bar-bar, you should be able to make these drinks anyway,” Nelis said. He and his team of three bartenders narrowed the list down from 400.
“We still have the document with all the others that we want to potentially introduce down the line. But we wanted to give the bartenders at least a little bit of a chance to memorize them — myself included,” he added with a laugh.
The expansion increases Specs’ capacity to 50 people in the café-bar and an additional 20 in the shop. Ongoing events include regular cocktail and spirit-focused workshops and a monthly open mic.
Specs’ coffee menu will be available into the evening, along with coffee cocktails such as espresso martinis and white Russians. Four beers are on tap, and wine, canned and bottled beer, and nonalcoholic options come from the attached shop. A small snack selection includes popcorn, chips, nuts, dips and a pickle trio plate.
Otherwise, “it’s drinks, drinks, drinks, all of them, all the time,” Nelis said.
