Gigantic Bar offers tropical experience close to home

Ned King, one of Gigantic Bar’s founding partners and Bar Manager, poses inside the “Escape the Northeast” makeover given to the bar to provide an escape for the public during the home stretch of the winter months.
Reminder Publishing photo by Trent Levakis.

EASTHAMPTON — As a way to combat the home stretch of the winter season, Gigantic Bar has created a tropical-style setting that allows bar patrons to “Escape the Northeast” when they enter its doors.

Happening now until the end of March, Gigantic’s “Escape the Northeast” seasonal effort was conceived to not only bring in some business during the slower months of the year, but also to offer a unique bar experience on Cottage Street.

“It’s a blast, I love these two months. It’s my favorite time of the year,” said Gigantic partner and Bar Manager Ned King.

The Escape the Northeast menu includes a variety of tropical drinks that are “Made the Gigantic Way,” from classics to new twists. The menu primarily contains tiki drinks founded between the 1930s and the 1970s, served in special cups to add to the tropical presentation, while the bar itself is covered in tropical decor.

Each item on the menu also contains historical background on the drink’s history. For a classic like The Zombie (1934), the menu shares, “The cocktail that started the longest drink fad in American history, from the depression to disco. Lost for nearly 70 years, the original recipe was discovered in the 1937 notebook of Beachcomber Maître d’Dick Santiago, who had marked the recipe “old.”

The history of The Skull and Bones (1960) is shared, as well: “This tropical delight would have been lost forever if it weren’t for ex-tiki bartender, Tony Ramos. Ramos was one of the original bartenders who worked at Don the Beachcomber in the 1930s. In 2001, while dining at a Chinese restaurant, he wrote the recipe down from memory on a cocktail napkin.”

The bar also specializes in vintage rum offerings, including aged options from the 1900s, and one item dating back to the 19th century.
“My approach to cocktails has basically always been the same, which is I like knowing why a drink is on our menu. More than just being creative and coming up with interesting flavors and stuff, I really do like to draw a lot of stuff from historical references or old drinks, or [I] like trying to work on things that I’ve seen before in the past and make them different or interesting,” said King. “That’s always been my approach; we’re definitely a historically-minded cocktail bar, and that feeds into the vintage spirits, too. I’ve just been collecting that stuff for a long time.”

The tropical theme will continue until March 28, where a final celebration for this year’s run will be held at the bar.

Opened in 2018, Gigantic was founded by partners James Stillwaggon and King. King told Reminder Publishing the bar world and this opportunity came to him spontaneously.

A Western Massachusetts native who’s originally from Orange, King was working as a Stop and Shop gas station attendant while studying history in college over a decade ago. During his shifts, he said he would use the gas station computer to kill time when things were slow. It was then when he first came across a YouTube channel called, “The Cocktail Spirit with Robert Hess,” which King described as a PBS style show that informed his inspiration.

“They were educational. He was really good at tying history to the drinks, so he would talk about where the drink came from and give it context, and I was already doing history and archaeology stuff at UMass at the time,” said King. “I wasn’t even much of a drinker but all of a sudden, I realized there was all this kind of historical stuff for the drinks, which is really what drew me to cocktails.”

King said this exposure led him to begin making cocktails from home. Soon enough, King was inviting people over consistently to try his creations.

What was still just a hobby eventually morphed into a job opportunity at Amherst Coffee’s Whiskey Bar. For several years, King worked there until he eventually met Stillwaggon.

Stillwaggon had just purchased the property that was formerly additional space for Amy’s Place Bar & Grill with hopes of opening a bar with a business partner. By the beginning of 2018, the two became partners and took on the new endeavor.

“I was not intending on opening a bar,” said King. “Most of the time, it doesn’t happen that way, but I just got lucky and took advantage of the opportunity. It was really opportune timing.”

Gigantic officially opened by December 2018.

“I had been to Easthampton a ton over the years, but I didn’t know what was going on here either. And it wasn’t a forgone conclusion that it was going to work,” added King, saying it was great to be part of the growth on Cottage Street.

Then the pandemic, like it did to most parts of the day-to-day life, caused the bar to take a step back, closing their doors for 15 months before they reopened sometime in 2021. King said that time allowed them to find different ways to evolve the bar.

“It wasn’t easy. We had to find ways to make stuff more affordable because alcohol was really expensive right after the pandemic. A lot of the stuff we were able to source before wasn’t there anymore or it was way pricier, so we made changes and we had less staff, and we sort of slowly built it back,” said King. “Once 2022 came around, that was a great year, because everyone wanted to go out again. That was actually the first year we did ‘Escape the Northeast,’ too.”

While Escape the Northeast was created post-pandemic, King said it also partially stemmed from his time at the Amherst Coffee Whiskey Bar.

“We used to do a tiki night on Sundays before the pandemic, which is something I did at Amherst Coffee too, because I really like tropical cocktails. We didn’t decorate or anything like this, we just had a separate menu, and I would roll out those drinks on Sundays. It wasn’t easy because it meant that every Sunday, we had to change out the well, we had to change all the syrups and everything. It was fun, but it was definitely time-consuming,” said King.

With this in mind, King thought maybe there was an opportunity to reincorporate the tiki night themes into the general bar experience, potentially though a seasonal option.

“That eventually became like, why don’t we take the slowest time of year for the bar, which is January through March, and see if we can do something fun with it to get people to come in. So I ended up buying a bunch of netting and tropical stuff, and it sort of slowly accumulated over time. It was definitely a risk, it also wasn’t a forgone conclusion that it was going to be a success,” said King. “At the time, I think it was surprising. And still, in kind of the opposite way, sometimes people don’t even know that we’re a regular bar. They only come for this. So, the reaction has been awesome. It’s the most popular thing the bar does, and it’s our busiest two months out of the year now.”

King gave credit to his bar staff, adding that an effort like this would not be made possible without a staff that can handle these complicated drink options in a busy bar setting.

King added that while they have plenty of unique offerings, the menu still maintains the classics that people come to expect with tropical cocktails, like Mai Tais, Zombies and Painkillers. He hopes the public considers the tropical escape offered right in their own community before the end of its run.

“Specifically, with the tropical drinks, these drinks tend to be slightly more expensive than others because there’s more alcohol and things going into them, but we spend a lot of time making sure that each drink has its own look and everything, and tiki drinks in particular have garnishes, mint bouquets and flowers and all this stuff. So, this is more fun than I think the standard, in terms of presentation,” said King. “If people want to come for this specifically, the last day of it is March 28, and we will have a big party that last day.”

The menu, and more information about Gigantic, can be found at www.giganticbar.com.