NuLu's new karaoke spot
After more than a year in development, NoraeBar was preparing for a grand debut in March. The high-end karaoke bar had just been approved for its liquor license the same day Gov. Andy Beshear mandated bar and restaurant closures to in-person traffic due to Covid-19 hitting Kentucky.To get more news about
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"I've equated it to Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and Lucy pulling it out from under him," said co-owner Zack Pennington. "We've been working on the project for almost a year and a half up until that point. There's no good timing for a global pandemic for sure, but that definitely felt like as bad of timing as it could have been."
The concept is different than most karaoke bars, which are usually just one big room full of singers and onlookers. NoraeBar — which is a play on the Korean word noraebang, meaning "song-room" — has nine private rooms for small groups of people.
Pennington, who co-owns the business with Louis Adamson and Joe Miller, came up with the idea after his fiancé, now wife, told him how much she loved private room karaoke. As a serial entrepreneur and musician, Pennington said he was drawn to the idea that it could appeal to both introverts, who only want to sing in front of friends and family, and extroverts, who will sing in front of anyone that will listen.Now, those private rooms have taken on a whole new level of importance to the business model as people are forced to distance themselves from one another during the pandemic.
NoraeBar is housed in a former warehouse in Louisville's NuLu neighborhood, right next door to La Bodeguita de Mima, an elaborate new Cuban restaurant. The building, which looks deceptively small from the street, is actually about 3,000 square feet with an equally large patio space.
Pennington said the project was a total build out, taking the space down to the concrete floor, ceiling and bare walls. Between purchasing the building and renovating it, the project cost more than $1 million.
"It was really a blank slate," he said. "My partner, Louis Adamson, is a general contractor and has done a lot of remodeling and construction, so his expertise for how to do that, combined with my vision and expertise of how to make the venue operate with both public and private space... I had a strong sense of what I wanted the space to be, and he had a keen ability of how to execute that."
The renovation process included all-new electrical and plumbing, with the installation of large bathrooms and a new heating and air conditioning system. They also ripped out the parking lot and turned it into a big patio area, which has turned out to be crucial to the new environment of 2020.
Prior to the pandemic, the NoraeBar could hold a couple hundred people inside, with even more on the patio. Pennington said when NoraeBar opens on Thursday, it will be operating at 25% capacity — 50 inside and 50 outside — even though bars and restaurants were recently bumped up to 50% capacity again.We've also decreased the capacity of the rooms as well, so now our largest group is now 10 instead of 14 to abide by the same standards other bars and restaurants are with table sizes," he continued.
Now I know what you're thinking — will they sanitize the microphones? Pennington said the business has purchased UVC sanitization lamp boxes that it will sanitize its small electronics in, along with single-use, disposable coverings for the mics.
"We're trying to build in a lot of redundancy because you can't really over-sterilize, you can only under-sterilize," he said, adding that they are also taking into account the timing between different parties in the rooms, giving time for the air to be filtered.
NoraeBar, which has a staff of eight people, only has a bar menu, so it will eventually allow people to bring in outside food. A few highlights of the bar menu include Truth Hurts ($12), Haku Japanese Rice Vodka, rum, mango puree, vanilla, coconut cream, rice milk and lime; and the My Kind of Town ($12), Norae's signature Old Fashioned is made with Kentucky-meets-Japan Legent Bourbon and Thai Bitters over Kentucky Straight Ice.
