RESTAURANT NEWS | NORTH CAROLINA

Wilmington’s Bespoke Is Now an All-Day Aperitivo Bar With Serious Cocktail Credentials

By Eric Barton | 4:45 p.m. ET, April 30, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Bespoke has always had the bones of the kind of Wilmington place people claim as their own: corner address, morning regulars, coffee cups, downtown foot traffic, and the useful feeling that it works just as well for five minutes as it does for an hour.

Now Robby Dow has turned it into something more interesting.

The former beverage director of Grand Army in Brooklyn has reworked Bespoke into an all-day café and Italian-inspired aperitivo bar, the sort of place where espresso and negronis are not treated like separate shifts in the day. They’re part of the same argument.

Robby Dow

A North Carolina native and NC State graduate, Dow bought Bespoke in March 2024 and renovated the downtown Wilmington space with designer Patrick Di Rito, of Chuck Marie Studios, and Old School Rebuilders. The room keeps the neighborhood utility of Bespoke, which opened in 2015, but the bar program now has the kind of focus usually associated with cocktail cities that like to remind everyone they’re cocktail cities.

The headline drink is Italian bitterness, handled with precision but not ceremony. Bespoke pours negronis, spritzes, and nitro carajillos from a draft cocktail system, with full bar service beginning in the afternoon. The bar also has what it describes as North Carolina’s largest vintage amaro collection, with bottles dating back to the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Kinky Love

Dow developed that taste for bitter Italian drinking culture during a career that took him from The Crunkleton in Chapel Hill to Grand Army, where his Amaro Shakerato drew national attention, and then back to North Carolina, including work on the beverage program at Olivero in Wilmington.

Shakerato

Surfer on Acid

The result is not a coffee shop with cocktails tacked on for extra revenue. It’s a neighborhood bar that happens to open at breakfast, with cold beer, vintage Fernet-Branca, clear ice cut in house, and a serious belief that a negroni at 11 a.m. isn’t a bad idea, it’s just living life like the Italians.