Victory Coffee and Calamity, the DeKalb Avenue coffee shop adjacent to LLoyd’s pizzeria, is now Stereo coffee and listening bar. People will still find the Inman Park shop serving coffee and gas station-style biscuits during the day, but soon, Stereo will open at night for cocktails and music.
The latest rebrand of the space (remember DeKalb Athletic Club) merges the coffee shop with a vinyl listening bar serving Japanese whisky cocktails and highballs. (Think Little Trouble’s drinks mingling with the low-key vibes of Victory Sandwich Bar, and maybe the former Decatur bar Paper Plane thrown into the mix.)
Victory Brands co-owner Ian Jones equates Stereo to hanging out in your best friend’s living room. His longtime friend and business partner, Caleb Wheelus, might be at the two turntables a few nights a week. Wheelus’s extensive vinyl collection ranges from smooth jazz and seven-inch punk records, to Steely Dan albums and Turkish funk from the 1960s. His records serve as the musical backbone for Stereo. Like Wheelus, close friends and employees with similar esoteric record collections are lending their vinyl libraries to the bar.
“We’ve been looking for an opportunity to do this. We already lease the space and it wasn’t doing anything at night,” says Jones. “In a way, it’s an extension of LLoyd’s. We weren’t interested in getting into another lease. This continues some of what we did at Little Trouble with cocktails and music but in a more hangout-type space.”
The menu from bartender Nik Soukavong will feature Japanese whisky cocktails and highballs, along with stirred drinks. Jones says opting for stirred rather than shaken cocktails keeps the noise from the bar to a minimum, allowing people to focus on their conversations and the music.
They’re installing a Japanese highball machine for custom sodas and making sparkling coffee drinks. In addition to cocktails, look for eight to ten wines by the glass and one rotating beer on tap. Coffee and sodas will be available any time Stereo is open.
Food at Stereo in the evenings will lean into dishes easily assembled behind the bar, like charcuterie and cheese. In true Victory Brands fashion, there will be at least one curveball on the food menu. For Stereo, that means smörgås–a buttered, open-faced Swedish sandwich, similar to a tartine.
While the coffee shop is open daily at 8 a.m., the listening bar will only be open Wednesday through Sunday, from 7 p.m. until late. Nighttime hours begin at Stereo around the first week of February.
Occasional weekend record sales are also in the works, where people can stop by and peruse tables of plastic milk cartons filled with vinyl titles. It’s all part of making Stereo communal.
“This space has become a hub for our friends and coworkers to gather and we’re expanding on that with Stereo,” Jones says. “We want to be a place in town where you can hang out, appreciate music, and enjoy a drink. It’s that simple.”