Minneapolis has excellent bars. It does not have many bars inside a 1916 English manor house with carved oak on the walls, centuries-old stained glass overhead and a fireplace that survived the Great Fire of London two rooms away.

There is one. It is the cocktail lounge at the Pillsbury Club, in the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion at 100 East 22nd Street, and this is how you get in.

First, the part people get wrong

The Pillsbury Club is a private, members-style club, and reservations are required in advance. It is not a walk-in bar. That is not velvet-rope theatre — it is a National Register mansion with a finite number of seats, and the reservation is what makes an evening in it feel like an evening in someone’s house rather than a queue.

Book through Plan Your Visit, where current hours and policies live. Guests with a reservation are welcome — you do not need to know a member.

The room

Rich woodwork, stained glass, low light. The lounge sits inside interiors that Charles Duveen — trading as “Charles of London” — bought out of English country houses and shipped to Minneapolis before the First World War. The panelling around you is genuinely old. The bar in front of you is not, and the contrast is the whole point.

If you want the full inventory of what came over — the Rotherwas oak, the Tudor plaster ceilings, the cathedral glass — that is on The Splendors. If you would rather just have a drink and look at it, that also works.

What is behind the bar

The list runs local and global at the same time. Grain Belt Premium and Surly Furious on the beer side, both Minneapolis. Wines by the glass — Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, rosé, Prosecco. Gin from Hampshire, Sidney BC and London; vodka from Minnesota, Texas and Poland; rum from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Cataño and Barbados. There is a Minnesota-made THC seltzer list as well, which is a very 2020s thing to find in a very 1916 room.

The kitchen is deliberately unfussy — smashburgers, garlic cheese curds with jalapeño ranch, State Fair pretzel bites, funnel cake fries. Nobody is asking you to dress for a tasting menu. The full list and current prices are on the dining page.

Make it more than a drink

Three easy add-ons, all in the same building:

• A guided mansion tour before you sit down, so you know what you are looking at.
• A Minneapolis Trolley tour — the vintage trolleys depart from the Club, so a tour and a drink is one address, not two.
• A private club room if you are a group. The Emerald Suite seats up to ten.

Where it sits, and what is nearby

The mansion is in Whittier, across from the Minneapolis Institute of Art — free admission every day it is open, closed Mondays. That makes an obvious evening: museum, then a walk of a few minutes, then a drink in a room the museum would happily accession.

The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, and the milling fortune that built it is the subject of the Mill City Museum down on the riverfront. If you are coming without a car, Metro Transit’s trip planner will get you here.

Staying the night? 300 Clifton in Loring Park is the mansion B&B a few minutes north, and Oakland’s on 9th has furnished studios downtown.

Book a table

Reserve through Plan Your Visit, check the menu on Dining, and come early enough to look up. The ceilings are four hundred years old and most people miss them.

Keep reading: our History Journal tells the story of how the house was assembled.

Keep reading: Which Room Did the Pillsburys Call the Coziest in the House?