A James Beard Award-winning bartender is opening a neighborhood cocktail bar in Northern Liberties

For more than a decade, South Jersey bartender Danny Childs has been developing “Slow Drinks,” an award-winning bartending approach that uses locally farmed and foraged ingredients for boozy and booze-free beverages, resulting in drinks that are essentially liquid snapshots of a place and a season.

Now Childs and his wife, Katie, are turning that philosophy into a bar of their own. Work is underway on Field Day, set to open in September in a street-facing space at 923 N. Second Street, inside the Cescaphe Ballroom in Northern Liberties. (Cescaphe will continue to operate in the rear of the building.)

Field Day will be a showcase for Slow Drinks-style cocktails, sodas, and ferments, complemented by a food menu from Sweet Amalia chef Melissa McGrath, a consulting partner.

Danny Childs first developed Slow Drinks at Cherry Hill gastropub Farm & Fisherman, and then published a James Beard Award-winning beverage book of the same name in 2023. He later brought the method to Philly cocktail bars Almanac and La Jefa — both recent James Beard semifinalists — as a beverage consultant.

The Childses envision Field Day as a neighborhood bar with a family-friendly vibe. More than half of the 68 seats and the entirety of the bar will be held for walk-ins. “We want it to be super-casual,” Katie Childs said. The couple hopes that the bar — the entryway to a former movie theater — becomes a go-to for locals to drop in; there’s capacity for 100 when you factor in standing room plus Cescaphe’s patio, which they’ll be able to use when events allow.

But the Childses are also framing Field Day as a “regional cocktail bar” that tells the story of the various (agri)culturally rich pockets around the Philly area: “We’re talking Poconos, Lehigh Valley, Delaware River Valley, Chesapeake, Pine Barrens, Jersey Shore, South Jersey farmland. We’re going to really try to tell that story on the menu,” Danny Childs said.

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Ingredients from those areas will inform not only the drinks but also the food from McGrath, who became a fan of Danny’s work after frequenting the bar at Farm & Fisherman. The intention is for Field Day to be “a bar with good food,” McGrath said.

The planned menu includes house-made soft pretzels, fried olives, and Pennsylvania Dutch-driven sandwiches featuring the likes of red beet eggs and custom-made Lebanon bologna. McGrath plans to weave various Slow Drinks ferments, such as pickled mushrooms, into the food menu and snack plates, which are odes to Katie Childs’ hometown of Hanover, aka “the snack food capital of the world.” They also plan to use tomato pie as a format to riff on other area specialties (think hoagie pie).

Another anchor of the Field Day menu: year-round boozy gelati. They’re planning to marry John’s Water Ice with Lancaster-sourced soft serve from 1-900-Ice-Cream. (There will be soft-serve cones for kids, too.) Danny, a Delco native, looks forward to recreating a treat he grew up with: “When I would go to John’s or Pop’s as a kid, you would get a soft pretzel and use it as a spoon.”

The cocktail menu will go heavy on highballs that will mix booze with Danny’s seasonal, house-made sodas (many of which will be available for takeout). He’s envisioning approachable combos like bourbon and birch beer, rum and clarified cream soda, and sherry and black cherry wishniak. More offbeat pairings will include Fernet and root beer, tequila with chicory-corn cola, and mezcal with celery soda. (That last one, the Cel Rey, will be familiar to patrons of Farm & Fisherman; a few other classics from the F&F menu — the black walnut Old Fashioned, La Poblanita — will grace the Field Day menu on occasion.)

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Besides highballs, Danny promises several other drinks, including freezer martinis, citywides, natural wines, and a few draft beers, namely Guinness and Slow Drinks’ collaborations with South Jersey’s Tonewood Brewing.

For all the emphasis on beverages, the Childses don’t want Field Day to read entirely like a cocktail bar. They’re designing it to be warm and welcoming. At night, the sunny, high-ceilinged space will be illuminated by vintage pendant lights and small table lamps. Designer Laura Weiszer, of Kensington-based Betsu Studio, “loves a strip light,” Katie said, “so every little ledge that you see is going to basically glow.” (Weiszer’s previous projects include Middle Child Clubhouse and Sacred Vice’s taproom.) Wood banquettes, booths, and a modular back bar with hidden TVs — to be revealed for Eagles games — will come from North Philadelphia furniture maker Loubier Design (Le Cavalier, Gabi).

A partially enclosed hutch in the front of the space will be stocked with Slow Drinks merchandise, house-made soda and kombucha, and wine. The mini outpost is inspired by Sullivan’s Fish Camp in Charleston, S.C., one of a long list of cities the Childses have traveled to since Danny left Farm & Fisherman in 2023 and started working as a beverage consultant.

In that time, he and Katie, a former events stylist for Terrain, have been building the Slow Drinks brand on social media and through classes, pop-ups, and beverages conferences. (Slow Drinks will have a headquarters and R&D lab on the second floor of Cescaphe’s building.) They’re weaving in their favorite takeaways at Field Day: nostalgia-driven aesthetics similar to Tina’s in Tulsa, house-canned cocktails like at Semiprecious in Denver, and a zero-waste program between the bar and kitchen inspired by Mexico City’s Baldio. Likewise, the bar will draw on globally sourced spirits made by producers who value “good, clean, and fair values,” Danny said.

“It’s very personal for us,” he said. “It’s the Slow Drinks bar that we’ve wanted to build forever.”