John Brown’s Aboveground patio has reopened; it represents years of a small staff’s dedication to the downtown scene

John Brown’s Aboveground patio is open again after three years, representing a small team’s labor to survive COVID, adapt to changing city codes and net a James Beard award nomination.

The first time John Brown’s Underground poked its head to street level, Dante Colombo built the bar’s COVID-era parklet patio with his dad.

“At the time, I called it my life’s greatest work,” said Colombo, who is a managing partner at the downtown craft cocktail spot affectionately termed JBUG. He said the construction may not have been professional-grade, but it had a homegrown shine.

He added, “Jumping off that, that feeling of what it meant to serve people out here and to see people enjoying time at a place you’ve created, like, that’s not a feeling that I think is rivaled by much at all in the world.”

The new aboveground patio hosts tables, chairs, water coolers and plants that were carefully curated by Jungle House, JBUG’s friend across the street. Folks are even welcome to bring takeout food from Cafe the Mani, the Korean restaurant upstairs, and chow down while sipping on a cocktail.

“I think that one of the things that we love about the basement is it creates this kind of underground, enchanting space,” said Clayton Capra, JBUG employee. “But the patio brings such a different energy and life, and the juxtaposition of the two is really beautiful.”

Rules and regulations

What may seem like another downtown patio to the passerby represents three years of effort from a small team confronting city bureaucracy.

Aboveground service wasn’t baked into the bar’s original speakeasy business model, but staff and customers quickly fell in love with the COVID-era parklet.

Colombo said they hadn’t meant to go so long without it, but when ordinances changed and requirements for patios tightened, they were put to the test.

JBUG is operated by four full-time and two part-time employees who all work the bar at night. They struggled to navigate the city’s daytime schedule with limited capacity and budget. When all was said and done, the team used the last three years to gain permission from their neighbors for the parklet, obtain signoff from the building owner, hire an architect to develop plans, address challenges to said plans and more, all before the structure was even built. Colombo estimated that the original patio cost $25,000. The parklet guests can enjoy today amounts to $65,000 in costs.

This isn’t the first time JBUG came out triumphant while traversing city codes.

A long-standing city rule requires that many downtown establishments with liquor licenses derive at least 55% of their sales from food. The ordinance initially targeted college bars to prevent downtown from becoming an overrun bar district. Craft cocktail spots with a community business mindset, like JBUG, hadn’t been popularized yet.

John Brown’s maintained compliance by factoring in food sales from Wake the Dead, a brunch restaurant located directly above them. But when the restaurant closed in 2021, it became clear that if the laws didn’t change, the bar would soon follow suit.

In 2022, following advocacy from businesses like JBUG and Lawrence residents, city commissioners temporarily suspended the rule. Multiple establishments like John Brown’s were in the clear, and the bar renewed its liquor license in July 2024, before the moratorium expired in December.

For Colombo, the fight wasn’t about being “above the law” or proliferating a college bar culture. It was an effort to promote creative freedom in the Lawrence food and beverage scene for industry professionals and resident epicures.

This drive toward innovative libations is what put them on the map in the face of erasure. In January, JBUG became a semifinalist for the prestigious 2025 James Beard Outstanding Bar.

“It’s very cool that we went from, genuinely, a period of time where we weren’t sure if we could exist anymore to now being the first James Beard semifinalist bar in Lawrence — that Lawrence has ever seen,” Colombo said.

Welcome to grandma’s house

The patio offers guests an airy experience that diverges from JBUG’s iconic low-lit bar floor or its side rooms with Lynchian red drapes and jungle cat murals. Colombo envisions a future of modular outdoor bars featuring guest bartenders and pots of homegrown herbs for the cocktails.

In the next month, the patio will even alter the DNA of the mixology.

The current menu, “JBUG isn’t real,” is rife with drinks inspired by cryptids, UFOs and conspiracy theories. One item on offer, which has been on offer since before the patio reopened, features a glow-in-the-dark alien that the bartender activates with a UV light. They quickly realized the effect gets lost in translation to the outdoors.

“We find that making drinks for patio is a different fundamental thing than making drinks for inside,” Colombo said. “So marrying those two things allows us to have a lot more creative freedom … we can do a lot more fun, outdoor-style drinks. And instead of pretending to escape outside by being inside, we can actually escape outside.”

Guests can look forward to cocktails tailored to patio service during next month’s menu drop, themed around “grandma’s house.” Colombo said that they might even gussy up the parklet with appropriately cozy decor.

There’s also the matter of money, which can sound like a dirty subject for a business based on principles — but it’s necessary to sustain a downtown gem and its employees.

In the past few years, any JBUG regular walking up on a Friday night sans reservation has known to hedge their hopes for an open table. With 25 to 30 additional seats thanks to the patio, fewer thirsty customers will be turned away or waitlisted, leading to increased revenue.

“People who work here tend to work here for a much longer period of time than the industry standard,” Colombo said. “And so the caveat to that is that, you know, it needs to be lucrative enough to support the actual full-time lives of a number of people.”

He said that Lawrence is often dependent on the ebbs and flows of university academic calendars, causing service industry work to feel seasonal.

But with just under a decade at JBUG, Colombo has hired fewer employees than the number of years he can tally with the business. He believes that model can continue to thrive while also promoting a healthier city with long-term residents.

“The more that we can create spaces and experiences that are independent of the universities, specifically, I think that the more healthy Lawrence will be, and the more that it will continue to develop its own identity,” he said. “… If you don’t continue to try new things and to support local businesses that are trying new things, then things can get stagnant pretty quickly, and that’s not the future that I want for Lawrence. The more healthy and vibrant downtown that we have, the better.”

The patio is load-bearing for many of these ambitions, but the needle is moving as John Brown’s Aboveground customers sit among Jungle House plants, enjoy food from Cafe the Mani and sip on local, craft cocktails.

John Brown’s Underground and Aboveground are located at 7 E. Seventh St. They’re open from 5 p.m. to midnight Wednesdays and Thursdays, and 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

The architectural plans for the patio come from local firm clark | huesemann; the primary carpenter was JBUG friend Tom Hay; and local sculptor Steve Rands did the steelwork.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

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