At first glance you might mistake it for a plant shop. That was deliberate. When Folia opened on South Tryon Street in October 2024, the entrance was concealed on purpose, and the room behind it was an indoor tropical garden built to look like a Miami rooftop.
The man behind the bar is Bob Peters, and in Charlotte that is enough of an explanation. An Axios writer once proposed that the city needed more Bob Peters and started asking who was the Bob Peters of architecture, of education, of nonprofits. Folia is what happens when the original one gets a room to himself.
It started with a hospitality group
Folia belongs to Built on Hospitality, the group founded in 2020 by chef Chris Coleman, Sean Potter and AJ Klenk. Their first restaurant, The Goodyear House in NoDa, opened in January 2020, just 48 days before the pandemic closed every restaurant in the state, according to the Charlotte Business Journal. They followed with Old Town Kitchen & Cocktails in Rock Hill in 2021 and later acquired Haymaker in Uptown.
Peters joined as beverage director after five years consulting, and the group announced Folia as a new concept next to Pie.zaa on South Tryon, with a cocktail list from Peters and a small plates menu from Coleman. The inspiration, Coleman told Axios, was the Miami rooftop bar Sugar: an indoor tropical garden.
The bar opened at 5 p.m. on October 11, 2024, open until 2 a.m. seven nights, and Coleman was clear about who it was for. Not the twenty somethings who fill South End on a Saturday. The founders wanted a place they would drink in themselves, something for people in their late thirties and forties.
The man behind the bar
Bob Peters is a Charlotte native who ran the beverage programs at The Punch Room and the Ritz-Carlton Charlotte, where he was named the Ritz-Carlton Corporation’s global bartender of the year in 2015, according to FSR Magazine. He has poured at the James Beard House in New York, at Charleston Wine & Food and at the Cayman Cookout alongside Eric Ripert, José Andrés and Anthony Bourdain. Charlotte Magazine has named him the city’s best bartender repeatedly, most recently in 2024.
His style is the opposite of showy. His cocktails are clean and simple with few ingredients, so a guest can taste each one, and the people who work with him describe an entertainer who can hold a whole bar’s attention from behind it. An up and coming bartender, asked by Axios who was the most overrated or underrated in the city, gave a one line answer: Bob Peters is the best, hands down.
Built on Hospitality has since opened a second bar with Peters, Chief’s Modern Cocktail Parlor, in a reimagined mill house in NoDa.
What you actually order
The cocktails have a botanical focus to match the room. The Folia & Flowers, gin with clarified lemon and rose syrup, is a Peters favorite, and the RazBasil pairs vodka with basil raspberry syrup. Classics run alongside the seasonals, with local beer, wine and zero proof options. The food is small plates from chef Tyler Long: a striped bass crudo and an nduja flatbread were the openers.
The biggest change came in June 2025, when the team knocked down the wall between the front window and the interior, according to Axios, and Folia became an all day cafe. It now opens at 9 a.m. with coffee, non alcoholic drinks and a breakfast item called the crunchadilla, moves to bowls and handhelds for lunch, and turns back into the cocktail bar at 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday it still runs to 2 a.m.
Peters’ awards run longer than most bartenders’ careers. He has been named North Carolina bartender of the year and the Ritz-Carlton’s global mixologist of the year, and Charlotte Magazine’s readers have given him their best mixologist award repeatedly since his years at The Punch Room. When Built on Hospitality announced his hire as beverage director, Peters said the group had big dreams and that it was an honor to play a role in the way they were transforming the community through the art of entertaining. This, he said, is only the beginning.
The room itself is the other draw. Folia’s main seating area mixes lounges and tables under hanging plants, with striped seating and colorful chairs, and the large windows at the back now flood it with daylight since the wall came down. The bar sits next to Wooden Robot Brewery and VINYL on South Tryon, which makes it the quiet option on a loud block, and it takes reservations, which for a cocktail bar in South End is a courtesy.
Why it matters
South End has no shortage of bars for the crowd that paints it red on a Friday. Folia was built for the people who used to do that and now want a quieter room, a better drink and somewhere to sit at nine in the morning with a coffee. That it went from speakeasy to cafe inside a year says the founders were right about who was looking for it.
The plants are real. The entrance is easier to find now. The bartender is still the best in the city, hands down.