There’s someone and someplace pretty amazing in downtown Las Vegas—and you’re staring and reading about it. This is Anthony Partridge, lead mixologist at The Laundry Room—the hidden cocktail bar inside the more easily findable Commonwealth on Fremont East.
“There’s been many Commonwealth regulars that have never been back here,” Partridge says. “They don’t know it’s here. There is no other place in Vegas like this. When guests have asked, ‘Where else is like this?’ I always say, ‘There is no place like this, you’ve found it.’”
The Laundry Room is a place for cocktail experiences. “There’s a cocktail methodology and philosophy that we bring to the way we build the cocktails and hearkens back to everything in that time frame when cocktails were cocktails,” Partridge says. And he’s the man heading it up. Born in England but raised in Las Vegas, he’s been “slinging drinks” for more than 20 years. He’s worked his craft from Phoenix to New York City and back to Las Vegas—working in fast-casual restaurants, corporate venues, dive bars, nightclubs and high-end spots.
“It took me 16 years to find this place, to find where I want to be,” says Partridge, who joined The Laundry Room in 2015.
For him, being a mixologist at The Laundry Room means having a place for him to conjure up his creative side—to create and compose cocktails that guests have never tried, cocktails that they’ll be blown away by, he says. “We offer a very small, very small room where you sit here focused on your drink as opposed to anything else. I am able to give guests something more than what they thought they were asking for in the first place.”
One of his favorite parts about being the lead mixologist inside this hidden cocktail haven is “producing and giving people an experience that they’ll remember forever in this type of environment,” he says, smiling.
Libation: Wet Heroine
Partridge says that at The Laundry Room, “we’re most notable for our one-off cocktails. What can we do outside of the menu.” But the menu is definitely worth a look—cool cocktails, with even cooler stories attached to each one, just like the Wet Heroine, inspired by and named after a 1920s figurehead that ran a speakeasy. The tropical-tasting cocktail is a mix of Royal Standard dry rum, green Chartreuse, passion fruit syrup, lime, pineapple, basil leaves and flames poured into the drink!
Benefit: How to get in? (There’s a pretty significant wait.) Visit laundryroomlv.com to see if you can snag a reservation.
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