Colin Carroll at Trifecta Tavern Image: Courtesy Colin Carroll

Trifecta Tavern’s former bar manager, Colin Carroll, is known for helping launch its bar program, with cocktails like a “Bone Marrow Manhattan” with vermouth-balsamic cherries, a charred orangewood-infused Alaska, and housemade spirits, like a crème de menthe.

After four years at Ken Forkish’s experimental wood-fired tavern, Carroll is launching his own venture: 5 & Dime, a bodega-inspired cocktail bar set to open this fall in the former location of O’Malley’s Saloon & Grill at SE 65th and Foster. It’s been in the works for more than a year, with help from business partner Alex Gessler and investors John Ricci and Eli Johnson (owners of Dots and Atlas Pizza).

Carroll’s vision of 5 & Dime was heavily influenced by the family-owned, neighborhood vibes of hoagie-selling East Coast corner stores—a perfect fit for this still largely ungentrified part of town. The bar’s future home, a 45 degree-angled building big enough to seat 75 (in addition to outside seating sometime in the future), screams of that bodega aesthetic.

As for the cocktails: expect a rotating menu of six to 10 of the creative, labor-intensive, modern concoctions that Carroll is known for, plus list of cheap and accessible classics. The menu’s themes will rotate—not seasonally, but depending on bartender mood. Carroll’s first point of cocktail inspiration? The Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers. Clever puns and ingredients TBD.

The future home of 5 & Dime at 6535 SE Foster Rd. Image: Courtesy Colin Carroll

Cheesy, cheap, New York-style Atlas Pizza will take up residence next door, serving slices late and expanding their delivery zone to the deeper reaches of Southeast. The two businesses will share a kitchen, separated by a wall with a revolving door for easy back-and-forth action. 5 & Dime will have its own “short and succinct” food menu as well, but it’s still in development.

Accessibility and convenience are at the core of Carroll’s vision. After a night of drinking high concept, technique-driven cocktails, he wants you to be able to walk out with a bottle of wine, a few single cigs, a bag of potato chips—even some Emergen-C for the morning after.

“We want to make the bar that we want to hang out in,” says Carroll, “where you can let loose and drink a perfectly executed negroni—but if you want to drink a bunch of bottles of High Life, that’s cool, too. We want it to be a melting pot.”