NC native brings Italian fashion & art to Raleigh’s newest craft cocktail bar
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- Capulet Cocktail Bar is a new cocktail bar at Raleigh’s The Exchange development.
- Italian-inspired bar features a 30-foot dome, Renaissance paintings and sculptures.
- Menu highlights Italian cocktails and wines; outdoor garden bar to be added later.
It’s hard to imagine that just around 100 days ago, Capulet Cocktail Club, with its 30-foot interior dome, velvet couches and giant prints of Renaissance paintings, was an empty room.
Bar co-owners Patrick Shanahan and Robby Opperman have spent most of their careers in the film industry. For every project Shanahan was director, Opperman was assistant director.
Now in the service industry, they’re still the ones making decisions, putting out fires, arriving first and leaving last. But with this new medium of storytelling, the bar has become the set. Servers and bartenders, the crew. Guests, the actors.
“I like seeing these real-life happenings in something that we built, and it’s more lasting and timeless than what we were doing in the film industry,” said Shanahan, who’s from Raleigh.
The same concept of world-building that the pair pursued in filmmaking has carried over into hospitality. And in the case of Capulet Cocktail Club, the new cocktail bar at The Exchange development in Raleigh’s Midtown area, Shanahan and Opperman hope to transport guests to Italy.
“Studying Italian cinema in film school and trying to emulate that here was a big inspiration for us in the film world,” said Opperman, who previously lived in Rome. “And then we decided to start building these places together, and we wanted to combine those two worlds to bring something new and fresh to Raleigh.”
The name, Capulet Cocktail Club, references one of the leading characters in William Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies, “Romeo and Juliet,” which is set in Verona, Italy.
The Italian theme is carried out through the design and the cocktail menu.
“If you’re in Europe, you see these spaces that have been reinvented probably 50 times since they were built,” Shanahan said. “And I feel like I wanted a space that felt like it had been reinvented through the eras and the decades.”
Shanahan and Opperman brought a 30-foot dome, one of the most well-known features of ancient Roman architecture, into Capulet Cocktail Club. Prints of Renaissance master paintings fill walls. Barrel chairs and Italian sofas from the 1970s play into their initial thoughts about what the bar should be.
“The original idea was kind of ‘70s, Italian discotheque-y kind of places,” Opperman said. “And when you go to Italy, those places still very much exist, especially the music and the vibe is very much like that.”
And next summer, Capulet Cocktail Club plans to unveil its outdoor garden bar, inspired by a coastal Italian setting, complete with covered seating for guests.
Shanahan and Opperman — who also built Peregrine, the restaurant steps away from Capulet — have also brought parts of themselves into the space. They completed the plasterwork themselves. A chandelier Shanahan made of recycled and found elements, wood and gold leaf is perched at the center of the dome. A stained-glass window formerly in a church and confessional screens reflect Shanahan’s Catholic upbringing.
Capulet Cocktail Club’s Italian menu
The menu, limited exclusively to alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, highlights Italian wines ($14) and drinks.
Beverage director Zack Thomas, who has led the bar at well-known local watering holes including Boatman Spirits Co., developed a cocktail menu that includes house specials ($16) and riffs on the classics ($14).
The Negroni, a traditional Italian aperitivo, is made with a hibiscus floater at Capulet.
One of its house drinks, the Matriarch, is made with vodka, the Italian bergamot liqueur Italicus, dry vermouth and verjus. The House of Capulet is a bourbon drink made with date and black cardamom, served in a rocks glass with a large block of crystal-clear ice and garnished with orange peel.
“We’re not trying to be as in-your-face with flavors as we are just more subtle,” Thomas said.
Delicore, but make it Italian
Capulet Cocktail Club pulls inspiration from fashion — an industry Shanahan really delved into during the pandemic, when he started fashion photography.
It’s not enough that the layout of the drink menu is based on vintage perfume advertisements.
It’s not enough that the wallpaper was designed by Alessandro Michele, the former creative director of the Italian fashion house who’s now at Valentino. (”He would love it here,” Shanahan said of Michele. “I don’t know him, but he would love it here.”)
Capulet Cocktail Club wants its guests to be able to take home fashion — not from the House of Gucci, but from the House of Capulet.
The merchandise will be “limited-run collaborations” with artists, Shanahan said. Red aprons designed for the staff by Raleigh Denim’s Victor Lytvinenko are first to be released.
“Then we’re gonna do some velvet slippers coming up,” Shanahan said. “We’ve got some ideas for some jackets, and working with different North Carolina artists to create these Capulet-branded pieces.”
The bar’s design and decor, its menu, the merchandise — it all stems from the interests, backgrounds and ideas of Shanahan, Opperman and Thomas, who are working to bring something beautiful to a city they know and love.
“You put your heart and soul into something, and then you welcome people into seeing that,” Shanahan said. “I think that our spaces are pieces of art, and we put a lot of time and effort in that.”
Capulet Cocktail Club is located at 1000 Social St. in Raleigh. It opens Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 5 p.m. Opening hours are 5 p.m. until close Tuesday-Saturday.
This story was originally published December 13, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "NC native brings Italian fashion & art to Raleigh’s newest craft cocktail bar."
