Key Results

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• Steady, growing revenue stream with consistent month-over-month subscriber retention
• R&D laboratory for the bar team, enabling experimentation with high-cost, small-batch ingredients that wouldn't work on the regular menu
• Deeper guest relationships, with club members returning for weddings, private events, and ongoing creative collaborations
• Local purveyor partnerships amplified through guaranteed club volume, including a co-developed fig leaf vermouth produced at 1,500 bottles

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Still a bar, just with better problems

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Trick Dog is one of the most recognized cocktail bars in the country, but Nick Amano-Dolan - Director of Operations for the Bon Vivants group - is the first to tell you it still has regular bar problems. The plumbing breaks, inventory needs doing, the walk-in is never the right temperature. What makes Trick Dog different isn't that it's above those realities, but rather what the team does in the space between them.

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Every six months, Trick Dog tears up its cocktail menu and starts from scratch with a full concept reset. That cadence keeps the creative energy high but introduces a constraint: when you're engineering drinks to sell five thousand units over six months, your ingredient sourcing has to scale. And scale doesn't always leave room for the small, the local, or the weird.

That's where the club comes in.

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The 75% pour cost and why it matters

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When Trick Dog partnered with Table22 to launch a monthly bottle club, Nick didn't see it as a revenue play as much as he saw a creative outlet. The club ships small-batch cocktails to local subscribers each month, and because the volume is measured in hundreds rather than thousands, the normal rules change entirely.

On the regular menu, a drink with a 75% pour cost would be a business failure. In the club, it's a feature.

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Nick and bar manager Travis can throw in rare ingredients, experiment with unfamiliar techniques, and put out drinks that would never survive the economics of nightly service. The club became Trick Dog's R&D lab, a space where the team could take risks with expensive, unusual, or limited ingredients knowing the batch size makes the math worth it.

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Table22 handles the subscription logistics, billing, and delivery coordination, which means the bar team stays focused on what they'd prefer to do: making drinks and building relationships. "It's super nice to have just another steady revenue stream," Nick says. "As much that you can have that's automated and deposits into the bank account every month - it's great."

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Koji, fig leaves, and the next new thing

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The club has become a launchpad for partnerships with local producers that the regular menu can't always accommodate. Nick has been deep in experimentation with Aiden, a San Francisco-based Koji producer founded by a Japanese native who couldn't find the fermented rice product stateside, so she decided to make it herself. Through the club's smaller format, the team has tested Koji across cocktail applications - using shio koji as a quick pickling agent for a cucumber-melon highball, exploring how amazake's texture works in blended drinks, and figuring out which forms translate to a cocktail glass and which don't.

The relationship with Vaso, a Treasure Island distillery, has gone even deeper. Over the past six months, Nick and the Vaso team have been co-developing a fig leaf vermouth, starting with California brandy infusions and refining the botanical structures and flavor profile batch by batch. They're producing 1,500 bottles, and club members may get premiere access to the first run.

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"One of my favorite things about Table22 is because we're locked into the six-month menus, we don't always have opportunities to work as locally and seasonally as we'd like. Because of the club, we're able to really hyper-focus on ingredients and producers."

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- Nick Amano-Dolan, Director of Operations, Trick Dog

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From club members to off-premise requests

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What surprises Nick most about the club is discovering how closely people are paying attention. Members come into the bar and reference specific drinks from previous months, noting what worked and what was an interesting departure. The level of engagement caught the team off guard.

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One couple showed up to plan their wedding cocktails armed with a spreadsheet cataloging every drink they'd had at Trick Dog, each one rated on a scale. Another member started a conversation through the club about a drink, mentioned he was planning his annual holiday house party, and asked for help. Nick ended up designing the entire bar setup, recommending a tiki theme, sharing simplified recipes, and steering him away from anything too labor-intensive. They've stayed in touch, and Nick looks forward to brainstorming the next party each year.

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These aren't transactions. They're the kind of relationships that turn a bar into someone's go-to spot, and the club is the connective tissue that makes them possible.

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"Community is what this is all about - trying to establish regulars, trying to make people feel friendly in your space. Table22 is a great option for that. It's just another way to develop deeper relationships with the people that are already coming into your space."

- Nick Amano-Dolan, Director of Operations, Trick Dog

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Your audience awaits

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The club has also quietly shifted how the team operates internally. What started as Nick's hands-on project has evolved into bar manager Travis's creative domain, a natural progression as the operation has grown. Travis knows what's in inventory, what's in season, and what's worth experimenting with. The club gives him a recurring canvas that complements the biannual menu cycle without competing with it.

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And when the six-month menu wraps and the team is sitting on forty pounds of surplus Massonia mint? The club offers a creative way to work through it rather than waste it. The constraint becomes a prompt, and the prompt becomes a drink that might not have existed otherwise.

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Nick's advice to other operators considering a club is straightforward: If Table22 is reaching out, it means there's an audience that wants what you're making. The club is a way to do the thing you're already doing, just with more freedom and a community that's paying attention.