Bar Flores
A home cocktail bar I run out of wherever I’m living. Bar Flores is the name I’ve given the corner of my basement dedicated to hosting friends and over-engineering the experience.
The software itself is open-sourced and I welcome any fellow enthusiasts taking a copy.
Photo of the bar setup goes here once I add it.
The bar
I do a themed menu roughly once a quarter (read: once per notable gathering occasion) with a few signature flavors. I always have plenty of mocktails, and aim for fast prep times. Each menu is inspired by a season, holiday, or place I’ve been recently. Since I travel frequently for work, I make a point of trying house cocktails to find inspiration.
Some recurring obsessions:
- Fruit juices in lieu of syrups — only when fresh, particularly when unusual for the area
- Spicy cocktails, featuring mole and hot sauce — yes, in a drink
- Unusual liquor flavors from around the world — and by world, I mean Total Wine
Sample menu and signature drinks coming soon. If you want a preview, come over.
The tech: BarMenu
To run Bar Flores I built BarMenu — an open-source cocktail ordering system, menu system, and inventory management system. It’s MIT-licensed, so fork it.
What it does:
- Themed QR menus per event. Guests scan, browse, and order without an account
- Live bartender queue with audio cues and keyboard shortcuts
- Menu and drink CRUD with drag-to-reorder, per-menu branding (colors, fonts, logo)
- Inventory and ingredient tracking with optional barcode scanning integrated to public ingredient databases
- Popularity analytics — what got ordered, what didn’t, who repeated
- CSV import/export for moving menus around, starting from someone else’s recipes, or faster mass entry
Stack: React 18 + TypeScript + Vite on the frontend; Node 20 + Express + Drizzle ORM + Neon Postgres on the backend; sessions, rate limiting, the boring-good stuff. I host all my projects on Replit with autoscale and find it cost-effective and easy.