About BarNoir
Cocktail: “BaDeeYa,“ as featured in Brown and Balanced Live with Campari Academy and Thirsty Magazine
BarNoirBoston is an emerging leader in on the ground hospitality advocacy and education. Led by founder Kyisha Davenport, BarNoir applies over a decade of professional experience to working directly with bar and restaurant operators who have been systemically excluded from high level, high quality access to professional resources in the hospitality industry.
As Boston sees one of the largest increases of available liquor licenses in the city’s history, we are preparing to enter an era of what could and should be incredible economic opportunity for many underserved neighborhoods and communities. However, without adequate training and preparation, many new businesses will experience severe challenges with service operations that could cause significant financial challenges, with many businesses closing altogether.
BarNoir, once solely a platform to connect Black bartenders in the city, has evolved to meet the urgent need for experienced beverage program development in both new and seasoned foodservice operations. We specialize in classic to contemporary cocktail menu creation, bar design, staff training, and operations management, all core elements of building and running a financially successful and culturally relevant food and beverage business.
In 2024, the State of Massachusetts signed into law H5039, authorizing 225 new liquor licenses to be issued in the City of Boston.
Provisions of this law reserves 15 of the 225 licenses for small theaters, outdoor spaces, and nonprofits.
More importantly, the law provides for neighborhood restricted liquor licenses – liquor licenses that can only be used in the neighborhood they are reserved for. If a business closes, the liquor license returns to city inventory, as opposed to the historic practice of licenses being purchased and transferred to wealthier areas of the city. This provision ensures that economic opportunity stays in historically underserved neighborhoods.
By the Numbers
Prior to Bill H5309, purchasing a liquor license could cost over a half million dollars. The cost is steep for most small businesses, let alone Black owned business already navigating challenges of securing capital from traditional funding resources.
In 2020, of the 1400 liquor licenses in Boston, only eight were held by Black owned businesses. Black people make up a quarter of Boston’s population.
With new liquor licensing initiatives, we’ve seen a strong increase of liquor licenses being awarded to Black owned businesses. However, this number still hovers at about only 2% of all licenses being held by Black owned businesses. There’s still plenty of work to do; let’s do it together.
The goal of BarNoir is to democratize the tools needed to run a successful bar.
When Comfort Kitchen, where BarNoir Founder Kyisha led as Beverage Director and Director of Operations, was named the only Massachusetts restaurant to their 2023 restaurants list, reservations tripled overnight. It became a common occurrence for Kyisha to field calls from folks as far as Australia sending congratulations, or asking “when is the cookbook would coming out?”
