Most new bars in Detroit pick a moment to announce themselves. The Aladdin Sane skipped the moment. The 32-seat cocktail lounge in the sublevel of Book Tower opened in January 2024 without fanfare, and stayed quiet for months while the press caught up.
The name is a 1973 David Bowie album. The bar is a Japanese cocktail lounge. Those two facts feel less arbitrary once you're inside, where the menu is divided into cocktails named for Bowie tracks (Sake & Strange Divine, Panic in Detroit, Watch That Man, Ziggy Highball) and a whiskey list that runs from Lagavulin to a $450 pour of Glenfiddich 29 Year Grand Yozakura.
The Yozakura is Scottish whisky finished in Okinawan awamori casks. Detroit has the only bottle in the state. Stokes Architecture and Design did the room with Method Co.'s Daniel Olsovsky.
The horseshoe bar sits low and centered, framed like a stage. Olive velvet benches run the side walls. A custom mural by Detroit artist Reverend Michael Allan covers the back.
The bar top is a single live-edge mahogany slab. Patrick Jobst, Method Co.'s assistant director of food and beverage, calls the room transportive, and he means it the way someone means it after their third visit to a bar that's been built to make you forget the door you came through. Finding the door is part of the gimmick.
You enter through the same stone stairway as Hiroki-San, the Japanese restaurant that shares the basement, then choose between two unmarked doors past the host stand. Pick wrong and you're in a coat room. Pick right and you're in a captain's quarters where the bartender is making a spicy margarita with yuzu kosho instead of jalapeño.
The cocktails average around $20. The sushi-rice-infused gin is real. The caviar garnish on the Sake & Strange Divine is real.
So is the awareness that Detroit didn't have anything in this register before Method Co. arrived to renovate Book Tower. Six other Method Co. bars and restaurants live in the same building. The Aladdin Sane is the one you have to look for.
1265 Washington Blvd., Detroit. Tuesday-Thursday 5-11 p.m., Friday-Saturday 5 p.m.-midnight.
