Kingfisher is the News

Salted Tomato Spagliato

“For a Negroni Sbagliato-inspired cocktail with umami flavors, Kingfisher’s bar manager Richard Marin sourced cherry tomatoes from Urban Community AgriNomics, a Black-led agriculture education nonprofit in Durham. His salted tomato syrup mixed with the semi-sweet vermouth resulted in the perfect salty and sweet aperitif.”

Farm- and Produce-Inspired Cocktails Make Kingfisher Special

“We specialize in showcasing local produce, foraged ingredients, and unique local products,” explained Umstead. “We start with an ingredient, such as corn, and work backwards to the spirit. The alcohol lifts up the local produce, and not the other way around.”

Local Limelight: Kingfisher's Michelle Vanderwalker

“Durham cocktail bar — and Triangle favorite — Kingfisher is back with new food, new drinks and new wares.
State of plate: The James Beard-nominated bar, known for its locally-sourced ingredients, took a two-week hiatus to revamp its menu and make new cups, plates and bowls.

Burger Royalty

“Live from Durham, NC, Greg and Sother sit down with Sean Umstead and Michelle Vanderwalker of Kingfisher, QueenBurger, and Queeny’s to talk about building a bar, a cocktail program, and a brand outside of a major market city, designing a hand-crafted tile bartop, and of course, the great burger pivot over the early 2020s.”

The 2023 James Beard Award Semifinalists

Kingfisher has been nominated for Outstanding Bar!

Beyond the Cocktail Glass

"But in a culture that’s largely amnesic about the old arts of clay, a new vessel could provide an extra layer of insight—a tangible way to slow down and see the thing in front of us with, potentially, more clarity. “[It] could make people more attentive to the whole experience,” Vanderwalker suggests. “They might not even be aware of it.”"

Punch

Going 10 Rounds with Top Bartender Sean Umstead

After all these years bartending and creating drinks, do you still enjoy going out to bars? “I love going out to bars. It revitalizes my passion and teaches me new things. I really enjoy looking at how other operators set up, design their space, and execute service. Bars are such a puzzle and it’s awesome to watch when it all clicks together.”

Daily Beast- Half Full

How To Love Green Peppers

"At Kingfisher, a cocktail lounge opening this winter in Durham N.C., owner Sean Umstead will make local produce the star of his drinks. His emerald-hued Oaxacan Bell begins with a green-pepper syrup that provides a backbone for the cocktail and draws out the vegetal notes of mezcal. The more bite, the better!"

Wall Street Journal

Tip Your Bartender: Bee Durham

"The Bee Durham is Kingfisher’s signature and most popular cocktail. The nuanced riff on the Bee’s Knees calls on wax-washed gin as the base spirit, a simple and inventive technique for added texture.!"

Punch

Why Kingfisher’s Personal Touch Sets It Apart From Other Craft Bars

“I think people like that feeling of a personal touch, that someone took the time to really think about the guest experience. I like providing a little bit of a surprise and delight for people when they discover all the different details everywhere,” says Michelle Vanderwalker.

FSR Magazine

The 10 Best New Cocktail Bars of 2019

“Taste the Triangle’s bounty at this downtown Durham cocktail bar serving up local ingredients courtesy of “coolers and shelves stocked with jars of preserved and fermented ingredients, from peaches to boiled peanuts,” writes Drew Jackson in the Raleigh News & Observer. Cocktails are seasonally and locally inspired, as in the Bee Durham, featuring Durham Distillery Conniption gin and both honey and beeswax from the city farmer’s market.”

Vinepair

2022 Women of Achievement

“Drawing on Michelle’s deeply ingrained artistic compass to tie together the design seemed only fitting. ‘ [To] really think about… the aesthetics of the whole experience and how much that affects people’s dining experience is really important,’ Michelle says. ‘It was kind of a natural fit to put the two together, and I’m really happy to be making art for public spaces for other people to experience.’”

Durham Magazine

Fig Leaf Mojito (Video)

“Umstead’s riff on a traditional mojito brings natural, coconut-like flavors, an ingredient not found in the Carolinas. “Finding ingredients that allude to that is really fun,” Umstead says about the special addition.

When the fig trees leaf out in the late spring through early fall, Umstead and his colleagues at Kingfisher began putting the leaves in different drinks on their menu. The process involves a three-day infusion of rum with fig leaves, allowing the earthy, nutty, flavor to join the traditional cocktail.”

The Local Palate

Angostura, Peychaud’s… Mole Bitters?

“When you think cacao and baking spice, it is just so natural to go for wood-aged spirits,” explains Sean Umstead, who pairs mole with Scotch in his sparkling wine–topped Fireside Cheer. “Unaged spirits usually scream fresh, vibrant and alive as opposed to the more tempered, subtler and rich flavors of aged ones.” Because of this, mole bitters make a great candidate for winterizing brighter drinks.”

Punch

Judges of the 2022 Made in NC Awards: Drink

“This cocktail is just one imaginative offering created by the mixologists at Kingfisher, the funky basement-level bar on Chapel Hill Street in Durham that Umstead co-owns with business partner Michelle Vanderwalker. At Kingfisher, Umstead aims to create an atmosphere with a certain magic. ‘You cannot have the best cocktail in the world at your house,” he says. “You need the sound of shaking tins. You need that weird citrus smell that cocktail bars have because they’ve juiced too many limes and lemons in a given day. The music’s got to be right; the bartender’s got to be right. And then when it clicks, it just clicks.’”

Our State Magazine

Your Next Favorite Bar

“That means lots of pickling and preserving and a strawberry daiquiri you’ll actually want to drink.”

Garden and Gun

Toxic Tonic

"While Durham’s Kingfisher bar is usually known for studious craft cocktails that emphasize local ingredients, Halloween is the time for “drinks that don’t take themselves too seriously,” Liebes says. Sometimes that means including ingredients that might not otherwise appear on the menu, such as food coloring—which, here, gives pineapple juice an electric green hue."

Wine Enthusiast

Five Drinks That Redefine “Beach Cocktail”

“One of my most commonly used techniques for coming up with cocktails is envisioning the scene [that] the drink would be ideal to drink in,” says Umstead. In this case, he says it’s a mint julep on the porch of a beach house, “listening to the waves and smelling that sea air.”

Wine Enthusiast

Booze is a Window on the World

"If you're new to the world of amari, you might want to start with Amaro Nonino Quintessentia. Made by the Nonino family in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy, this amaro, made with herb-infused grappa, is considered by bar experts to be one of the most drinkable.
"It has really pretty notes of bitter orange and some vanilla and some caramel and some baking spice and some herbaceousness," says Sean Umstead, owner of the bar Kingfisher Bar in Durham, North Carolina. He also loves that it's not overbearingly bitter."

CNN Travel

Top 10 Honorees for the 2020 Spirited Awards

Best New American Cocktail Bar East

Kingfisher Bar — Durham, NC

Tales of the Cocktail

Kingfisher is Closed [for COVID-19] but its Owners Still Want to Show You a Good Time

"The day they closed, Umstead and Vanderwalker decided to crack open a cold one. They opened Instagram Live and began a virtual happy hour—part mixology class, part daily hang. They haven’t missed a happy hour since.
So while all semblances of normalcy may have dissolved, if you go to Kingfisher’s Instagram Live story at 4:30 every day, you can find the pair mixing drinks and dishing out cocktail tricks. It’s a warm ritual and boozy reprieve."

Indy Week

Kingfisher has been featured on Eater, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, PUNCH, Imbibe, The News and Observer, Wine Enthusiast, Garden and Gun and many more.

Please contact Kelsey Burrow of Dear Clive Public Relations for any media inquiries. kelsey@dearclivepr.com