Nicky Blaine's Cocktail Lounge

The Downstairs Standard on Meridian Street

There is a particular grammar to the American cocktail lounge that predates the craft revival by several decades. Dim lighting calibrated for conversation rather than content creation. Booths deep enough to disappear into. A bar built around spirits that reward patience. Nicky Blaine's Cocktail Lounge, set below street level at 20 N Meridian Street in downtown Indianapolis, operates inside that grammar with more conviction than most of its contemporaries. Where the dominant mode of urban American bars in the past fifteen years has been transparency, open kitchens, bright lighting, chalkboard menus broadcasting provenance, this room reads as a deliberate counter-position.

Indianapolis's downtown drinking scene has diversified considerably. You can find high-energy sports-adjacent bars within a block of Gainbridge Fieldhouse, distillery taprooms with production visible through glass walls, and hotel lobbies that double as cocktail programs. Nicky Blaine's fits none of those categories. Its North Meridian Street address sits within the central business corridor, close to Monument Circle, which means it draws a professional after-work crowd, out-of-town visitors staying in the surrounding hotels, and regulars who treat the place as a standing appointment rather than an occasion.

The Lounge as Ritual Space

The supper-club lounge format imposes a particular set of customs that differ meaningfully from the bar stool-and-cocktail-list experience that dominates contemporary drinking culture. You settle before you order. The pace is set by the room, not by a ticketing system or a QR code. Nicky Blaine's operates in this tradition, and the physical environment reinforces it: the below-grade location removes street noise and pedestrian distraction, creating a sensory register that is closer to a private club than a public bar.

This kind of space tends to produce a different drinking behavior. Classic cocktails, the format that suits this environment, require less explanation than modern builds and allow more attention to remain on the conversation or the company. Across the American cocktail revival, the venues that have held this position most credibly tend to be the ones that resisted the urge to over-intellectualize the list. Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu and Jewel of the South in New Orleans both operate with a similar commitment to format discipline, where the drink serves the ritual rather than the reverse. Kumiko in Chicago extends this principle into Japanese-influenced minimalism, while The Parlour in Frankfurt on the Main demonstrates that the same lounge grammar translates across continents.

Downtown Indianapolis and the Case for the Classic Lounge

Indianapolis is a convention city with a serious sports calendar, the Colts, the Pacers, and a rotation of NCAA events that fill hotel rooms year-round and send waves of visitors into the downtown bar circuit. That traffic pattern tends to reward venues with high volume and broad appeal. The classic lounge is, structurally, the opposite of that model: it is optimized for lower turnover and higher engagement per visit. The fact that a room like Nicky Blaine's maintains a presence in this environment is itself a form of editorial statement about what a section of the Indianapolis drinking public actually wants.

For context, the city's bar scene includes options across a wide range across format and intent. 317 Burger and Alley Cat Lounge serve different registers of the casual end, while Almost Famous and Aristocrat Pub and Oxford Room each occupy their own defined niches. Nicky Blaine's does not compete with any of those directly. It occupies the tier where the primary product being sold is time spent well in a particular atmosphere, and the drink is the vehicle rather than the destination.

Nationally, bars that hold this position have found different ways to sustain it. Julep in Houston leans into Southern cocktail heritage, ABV in San Francisco operates with technical specificity, and Superbueno in New York City builds identity through cultural focus. The classic lounge model represented by Nicky Blaine's is a different strategy altogether: durability through format, not novelty through concept.

What to Expect and When to Go

The lounge is located at 20 N Meridian Street, which places it within walking distance of the major downtown hotels and the convention center. For visitors using Indianapolis as a base for a conference or a sporting event, this is a practical detail: the room is accessible on foot from most central accommodation, and it offers something that the hotel bar adjacent to a convention block rarely does, which is a sense of remove from the event you just left.

For those building an evening around the space rather than a specific event, the classic lounge format rewards arriving without urgency. The ritual here is not structured around a fixed tasting menu or a show, it is structured around the arc of a long drink, a second round if warranted, and the kind of conversation that benefits from a room that does not try to move you along. Visitors familiar with the format from venues like Bar Leather Apron will recognize the etiquette immediately. Those arriving from noisier bar formats may need a moment to recalibrate to the pace the room sets. Our full Indianapolis restaurants and bars guide covers the broader scene if you are mapping an evening across multiple stops.