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Dustland is in the details. They practically spill out the front door. The reversed “D” at the end of the bar’s old-timey logo. The analog photo booth. The glassware shaped like Solo party cups. The custom wallpaper in the ladies’ room, featuring the owners’ pets. Dustland’s critter mascots—Rhodey the Roadrunner, Tumble the Jackrabbit and Dusty the Dust-Devil—appearing throughout that establishment on this, that and the other. Dustland even has a theme song, performed by Kentucky band the Honkytonk Wranglers. It’s on the Instagram page. Bar with a theme song!
Co-owners Jen Taler and Roxy Hendrickson and bar manager Kat Calma are only too happy to point out more details of this high desert-styled bar and music venue, recently opened on the Art District’s Commerce Street corridor, as we sit at Dustland’s wood-and-stone bar. Calma hands me a plate of elote-inspired corn nuts along with a sample of the Amarillo ($16), a smooth Negroni variant made with Producer Mezcal, Luxardo Bitters and Nixta elote liqueur. (More details: Dustland’s rocks glasses are cut-and-polished liquor bottles, and their cocktails are named for classic cars.) Hendrickson points out the raised wooden accents on the banquettes, which she custom-built with her husband Logan, her partner in boutique furnishings company OneFortyThree. And Taler fires up the (working!) player piano on the indoor stage.
It’s the kind of place that could only come together when friends collaborate closely, drawing from a wish list of things they love. For Taler and Hendrickson, it’s their beloved hometown, the dusty bars Taler knew coming up in Texas, and a certain late, lamented Downtown venue.
“We’re Nevada kids at heart; forever, never, never leaving,” Hendrickson says. “[Dustland is] things that embody what we love about being out here, and what we miss about what Vegas used to be.”
“There were definitely conversations around Bunkhouse, how we loved that place,” says Taler, who spent plenty of time at the defunct Downtown venue as the co-founder of Fergusons Downtown.
“Then we brought in the spaces that we like to go to when we travel,” Hendrickson adds. “We love us an Ace Hotel.”
Dustland ties together all these influences and ideas so seamlessly that it all feels easy; like it wasn’t purpose-built but discovered, intact, from Vegas’ frontier-chic beginnings. But at the same time, Dustland is so fitted to its moment that the neighborhood might have willed it into existence. The bar’s back patio stage, with room for a couple of hundred people before it, will become vital when Taler activates it this fall: she’s already speaking with several local promoters about booking for it. Calma’s bar program, which features a beer collaboration with Juxta Nomad—a tumble wheat, prickly pear and peppercorn hefeweizen—is adventurous enough to satisfy explorers from Liquid Diet and Prowl.
And the careful attention to nearly everything, from Hendrickson’s handsomely re-upholstered barstools on out, reminds you of what neighborhood you’re in. Dustland is music, drink and vibe, but it’s also a collaborative piece of art that will only become more itself over time.
“Logan and Roxy have such a great design business … From a design perspective, I didn’t have to really think or say anything, because I already love what they can do,” Taler says. “I’ve had the operational background, the opening of a large-scale project [in Fergusons]. And then, being able to find Kat to do the bar programming … it really created this great partnership between the four of us, to create something magical.”
DUSTLAND 1433 S. Commerce St., thedustlandbar.com. Monday, Thursday-Saturday, 4 p.m.-1 a.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
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