A private poker room, an outdoor beer garden, and a rotating menu headline downtown Cascade’s newest hangout.
North 55 Social opens its doors tonight at 5 p.m. after a year of renovations to the historic building at 105 N. Main St. between Squirrel Outdoors and Change Café.
“It’s taken about a year to get this project from cradle to grave, and that year has just been a roller coaster ride,” said Joe Critchfield, a Cascade resident who owns the building.
Critchfield’s goal was to create a diverse culinary experience while preserving and enhancing the building’s rich history, which traces back to the early 1900s.
“That kind of rustic, eclectic cowboy feel is what we’re going for,” he said. “It’s not a cowboy bar and it’s not just a restaurant, so that’s why we call it a social house. it’s a place where people can gather and have nice date nights or social gatherings.”
Historic ties
Previous operations in the building include Mac’s Café, a surveyor’s office, and a telephone dispatch center. Original brickwork that dominates the interior of North 55 Social shows grooves in the bricks from where the switchboards used to be, Critchfield said.
Critchfield plans to hang historic pictures of the building’s past inside North 55 Social, while a private poker room with liquor lockers pays homage to rumors that the building’s basement once housed a Prohibition-era speakeasy.
“I wanted to kind of bring that old history to fruition on the legal side,” he said.
Mexican theme—for now
While Critchfield hopes the atmosphere attracts people to the social house, he knows it is the food that will determine whether they come back.
Starting out, the menu offers Mexican-themed appetizers and entrees, including pork carnitas, Navajo chili, tacos, nachos, and quesadillas.
Critchfield’s personal favorite is the Spanish crab cheesecake appetizer, which features real crab meat baked with tomatoes, peppers, green onions, bacon, and smoked cheddar.
Rotating menu
Come June, however, the menu will change to an entirely new theme.
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“I’m a foodie, and so I don’t want to just have that same option over and over forever,” Critchfield said. “Every 30 to 60 days, we’re gonna end up having a whole other menu.”
The key to North 55 Social’s rotating menu is Chef Seth Deason, who formerly owned North Fork Café in Cascade. Deason has the freedom to tap into more than two decades of culinary experience in crafting each menu to complement seasonal tastes and customer requests.
The one constant is that menu items will emphasize scratch kitchen recipes rather than ordered products. Critchfield also expects most of the items to be unique.
“Nothing on our menu you can go and get anywhere else in this in this county,” he said. “So that’s what I’m excited for.”
Private poker room
Besides the normal bar offerings, which include custom cocktails and 10 draft beers, customers may also rent private liquor lockers to store their own personal bottles in the private poker room.
“When you come in, our stores will serve your own drinks out of your own bottle from your liquor locker,” Critchfield said.
Although labeled a poker room, Critchfield sees the room as an ideal place for ladies’ nights, business meetings, birthday parties, and other events.
North 55 Social also incorporates the outdoors into the design of the building. Large new windows on the front open to Main Street, while a beer garden in the back alleyway is expected to open by June.
The beer garden will include a stage for live music, field turf, murals, and yard games like cornhole.
North 55 Social is open from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday through Monday.
