Niwot gem Farow centers cocktail craftsmanship

NIWOT — Sometimes the table at a restaurant is next to a window with a view of the mountains or the sea. Sometimes it’s next to a cozy fireplace, or near the corner where live musicians take the stage on weekends. 

At Farow, a farm-to-table eatery in the heart of Niwot, the best seats in the house might not be at a table at all — they might just be at the bar.

It’s there where bar manager Johnny Adair, a 17-year hospitality industry veteran who got his first food and beverage job cooking at Whole Foods and switched to mixing drinks about a decade ago, works his magic, combining locally grown herbs and flowers with rare spirits to create the one-of-a-kind elixirs that have staked out Farow’s place on the Front Range upscale cocktails map. 

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“There’s a choice to be made: You either go back toward the dive bar direction, slinging beers that you open and two-ingredient drinks from the gun, or you try to do something unique and make stuff out of fresh, delicious ingredients,” Adair told BizWest. “… I have a lot of back-of-house experience, so I try to use as much of my cooking knowhow to preserve the freshness and flavor of an ingredient, or to put a little bit of technique onto something that a bar doesn’t typically try to tackle.”

The result of Adair’s experience and technique is the creation of unique cocktails such as clarified milk punch inspired by American Colonial-era pubs or a schmaltz-washed-bourbon cocktail called Zayde’s Matzo Ball Soup.  

Sound weird? That’s because it is. But fear not, the Farow team will be there to walk you through your cocktail adventure.

“We don’t want to shock people completely and throw them off, but we’re able to introduce people to things that they might not have encountered in the past … and gently kind of push them in a more adventurous direction,” Farow bartender Noah Elkind said.

Gaining a reputation as the “spot right now that does off-the-wall stuff like this helps a lot” to raise the overall culinary profile of Niwot, Elkind said. “Johnny and I are nerds about this stuff, and we want to do weird things and talk to people about it.”

Right now, most Farow customers come from surrounding Boulder County communities such as Boulder and Longmont, but “I definitely feel like we have potential” to be a culinary destination for visitors from a much wider swath of the region, Adair said. 

Like Farow’s kitchen, the bar follows a farm-to-table philosophy, with an emphasis on Colorado ingredients such as berries, chilis and spices that are used to craft bitters, syrups and other mixes.

“Quality has to come first, not only with your liquors, but also with your fresh ingredients,” Adair said. “

Restaurant-wide, Farow shoots for sourcing at least 90% of its produce from within about 10 miles of the 7916 Niwot Road restaurant. For fresh cocktail ingredients, that distance is often less than 10 feet. The restaurant has patio garden beds just outside of its doors that “we plant strategically so we can use (produce) off of them throughout the year,” Adair said. 

If you fall in love with a cocktail at Farow, Adair and his team can teach how to recreate it (to the best of your abilities and access to ingredients, of course) at home during the restaurant’s regularly held cocktail class nights. 

“We focus on bar basics,” Adiar said, “simple techniques and a couple of recipes where I’ve taken a classic and put a twist on it.”