Volstead's Emporium Uptown

West Lake Street and the Bar That Names Its Contradictions

Uptown Minneapolis has long functioned as the city's counterweight to the more polished dining corridors of the North Loop and downtown core. West Lake Street, where Volstead's Emporium sits at 711, carries that character in its bones: neighbourhood bars, independent operators, and a foot traffic that skews local rather than tourist. The address alone signals the bar's positioning. This is a neighbourhood cocktail program anchored on one of Minneapolis's more historically layered strips. It is a neighbourhood cocktail program that has chosen one of Minneapolis's more historically layered strips as its anchor.

The name itself is a provocation worth unpacking. Andrew Volstead, the congressman from Granite Falls, Minnesota, authored the Volstead Act of 1919, the legislation that gave the Eighteenth Amendment its enforcement teeth and made Prohibition a federal reality. A bar named after the man who banned drinking occupies a particular rhetorical position in American drinking culture, one that acknowledges the country's complicated relationship with alcohol, its legislation, and the underground economies that grew around both. Across American cocktail culture, bars that reference this era tend to fall into two camps: those that play it as costume drama, with speakeasy theatrics and hidden doors, and those that use the reference as a genuine entry point into the history of American spirits and mixing. The name at 711 W Lake St leans toward the latter framing.

Minneapolis Cocktail Culture and Where Uptown Fits

Minneapolis's bar scene has matured considerably over the past decade. The city now supports a range of serious cocktail programs, from the precise, research-driven formats you find at places like 112 Eatery to the more casual neighbourhood registers of bars like All Saints Restaurant. The Able Seedhouse + Brewery represents the craft production side of the city's drinking identity, while 5-8 Club anchors an older, more food-forward tradition. Volstead's Emporium Uptown operates in the cocktail-forward tier, but in a neighbourhood context that resists the sterility that sometimes follows serious bar ambition.

Uptown has historically been the part of Minneapolis where independent businesses survive longer and where a bar can build a genuinely local regular clientele rather than relying on destination dining traffic. That dynamic shapes what a cocktail program needs to be in this postcode: technically credible enough to hold attention, but accessible enough not to alienate the West Lake Street regular who walks in without a reservation. The tension between those two demands is where the more interesting neighbourhood bars in American cities tend to live.

On a national scale, the bars that occupy this particular register, serious but not precious, referential but not theatrical, tend to build their identities around sourcing and ingredient discipline rather than elaborate presentation. Compare the format to what Kumiko in Chicago does with Japanese technique, or the way Jewel of the South in New Orleans frames its program through historical New Orleans cocktail lineage. Both demonstrate how a bar can carry historical weight without turning the concept into period costume. Julep in Houston does something similar through the lens of Southern spirits. Volstead's Emporium's name places it in that conversation about American drinking history, even if its Uptown Minneapolis setting gives it a distinctly Midwestern inflection.

The Logic of a Prohibition-Named Bar in 2024

What the Prohibition reference does, when handled with intelligence, is frame the entire American spirits tradition as something that emerged partly from scarcity and partly from prohibition-era improvisation. The cocktails that survived Prohibition were often the ones that could mask the rough edges of bathtub gin or bootleg whiskey with citrus, sugar, and bitters. When that context is used editorially by a bar program rather than theatrically, it tends to produce menus that take American base spirits seriously: rye, bourbon, American gin, and the domestic vermouths and amari that have proliferated since craft distilling expanded in the 2010s.

Sourcing in that framework means thinking about the American distilling map: where the rye comes from, which small-batch bourbon programs have aged product worth using, which domestic producers are doing interesting work with herbal liqueurs. The leading American cocktail bars working in this register, from ABV in San Francisco to Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu, tend to treat their back bar as a sourcing statement as much as a practical toolkit. Superbueno in New York City makes Latin American spirits the editorial spine of its sourcing logic. The Parlour in Frankfurt on the Main demonstrates that this kind of ingredient-led editorial identity travels well beyond American cities. At Volstead's Emporium, the Prohibition framing implies a similar orientation toward American spirits heritage, whatever the specific execution looks like on any given menu cycle.

Planning a Visit to West Lake Street

Volstead's Emporium Uptown sits at 711 W Lake St, in the stretch of Uptown that runs between Hennepin and the lake corridor. The neighbourhood is walkable from the adjacent Lyn-Lake area and accessible by transit along the Lake Street corridor. For visitors staying downtown or in the North Loop, it represents a deliberate short trip rather than a convenient stopover, which tends to filter the clientele toward people who made a choice to be there. That dynamic, where a bar requires some intent to reach, generally produces a better room. The bar is open Wednesday and Thursday from 5 PM to 12 AM, Friday and Saturday from 5 PM to 1 AM, and closed Monday, Tuesday, and Sunday. Reservations are recommended.