Alicia Horn Merritt preferred not to broadcast the final days of Birds of a Feather.
To regular customers, the impending closure of the Fells Point scotch bar, after 44 years in business, was an open secret. And even for outsiders, there were a few signs of change afoot: a freshly painted green door at the entrance, and the gradual thinning of the bar’s eclectic decor.
But Merritt didn’t make any announcements as the last weekend at Birds of a Feather approached at the end of March. Still, the bar was slammed as Baltimoreans came to pay their respects Friday night.
“They drank up almost a whole bottle of Auchentoshan,” Merritt said of the crowd, which included everyone from tourists to customers of more than four decades.
Saturday, Birds of a Feather’s last night in operation, was a quieter scene. Over a catered meal of sandwiches, pasta salad and petits fours, a private party of about 20 people toasted the long-running scotch bar one final time, said Mark Walker, a regular who helped organize the event. Someone else tended bar so that Merritt could enjoy the company of longtime customers, who have since become friends.
Merritt, 74, is retiring and selling the bar to Will Mester and Rosemary Liss, the owners of acclaimed Station North restaurant Le Comptoir du Vin, who plan to make the space into a pub of their own.
The building at 1712 Aliceanna St. had a colorful past even before it became Birds of a Feather. Merritt said the storefront has been home to taverns since the 1890s, including a biker bar and the scotch bar’s immediate predecessor, a lesbian bar called JB’s Place.
She and her late husband, John Horn, opened Birds of a Feather on Jan. 1, 1980. The couple, who met at the storied Eutaw Street dive No Fish Today, where Merritt was a bartender, decided to focus on scotch because that was Horn’s drink of choice: He favored a glass of Glenlivet, served neat.
The bar’s name came from a side business Merritt was running at the time, sculpting colorful cockatoos, parrots, flamingos and other birds for friends and local businesses.
“We had all the checks made out to Birds of a Feather,” she said. “And back then it used to cost a lot of money” to get new checks printed. So they transferred the sculpting business’ name to the bar instead.
Their early days of bar ownership were filled with manual labor. The Birds of a Feather building was in need of some major repairs, Merritt remembered: “When you walked in the door, you could see down to the basement, because there were holes in the floor.”
She and Horn, a construction worker, did much of the work of strengthening the building’s foundation themselves. With the help of a bricklayer, a plumber and a handyman, they dug mounds of dirt out of the basement and smoothed new floors with a concrete vibrator. They had fresh plumbing and electrical wiring installed, too: “We did the whole nine yards.”
They also took time to learn about the world of scotch, traveling from Scotland’s Highlands to the Lowlands to absorb as much as they could about the uniquely Scottish whisky, made from malted barley.
Though scotch connoisseurs can easily spend hefty sums on their hobby — some bars serve pours priced at more than $700 — Birds of a Feather honed in on the more affordable options. The bar carried about 70 bottles of scotch, from Bowmore, Laphroaig and Highland Park to Glenlivet, Glenfiddich and Glengoyne.
“People who like scotch whisky appreciate a bar like mine because I don’t carry the high end stuff,” Merritt said. “If you want somebody to drink this stuff, you start them out at the low end. And sometimes the low end is the best part of the scotches.”
There was no hint of stodginess at Birds of a Feather, either. Some of the bar’s regulars were known for their antics, like the time one of them mocked up a zoning sign that fooled Fells Point residents into thinking a driving range would be taking the place of an empty lot nearby.
“The neighbors lost it,” said Merritt. “We used to have so much fun down here. We were always doing some crazy thing.”
Walker began frequenting the bar in the early 1980s, stopping by for a drink after getting off of work at Johns Hopkins Health System. Though he’s not a scotch drinker, he was drawn to the camaraderie of the place.
“People would talk about a wide variety of subjects, mostly about local politics or things happening about the neighborhood,” he said. “There was always good conversation going on, nice people.”
Merritt kept the bar running after Horn passed away in 2004. It was at Birds of a Feather that she met her next husband, Bill Merritt, a Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist.
In 2013, Southern Living named the “hole-in-the-wall” spot one of the top three whiskey bars in the South. Even as more bars added cocktail programs, Merritt kept hers focused on the scotch itself. Though she had beer and other spirits on hand, the only cocktails she served were Manhattans and martinis — and if a customer asked to mix their scotch with Coca-Cola, she declined.
“One of our mottos used to be ‘taste the difference,’” she said.
The bar’s departure is another sign of changing times in Fells Point, where landmarks like Bertha’s Mussels and The Red Star have closed in the past few years. Some have found successors, like The Dara, a Thai restaurant that opened last summer in the former Red Star space. The neighborhood has also welcomed an influx of new bars and restaurants, like Osteria Pirata, Prima Dopo and Sacré Sucré.
For a time in the 1990s, Birds of a Feather also became a restaurant, with Merritt’s son, Timothy, serving as the chef. Liss and Mester plan to bring a culinary component back to the space with their forthcoming pub, expected to open before the end of the year. The bar building still has a kitchen as well as a second-floor dining room.
Mester said the food at Birds of a Feather’s successor — a name is still being worked out — will be “more or less an extension” of the menu at Le Comptoir du Vin, a cozy bistro known for French-inspired fare like chicken liver pâté and sourdough bread with creamy Normandy butter.
“I only really cook in one way,” Mester said. “You can expect something quite similar, though I’m sure there will be differences given the space.”
Business partners Mester and Liss are buying the building, which will undergo some small changes to “make it our own, but nothing crazy,” Mester said. His wife, Millie Powell, will be involved in the pub, too. (Le Comptoir du Vin isn’t going anywhere, he added; “things are going well” there.)
The new owners have purchased the bar’s inventory, too, so the Glenlivets and Laphroaigs will be staying on the shelves.
“There will be scotch,” Mester said.
