The Mob Museum’s Speakeasy Makes Its Debut

The Underground at The Mob Museum

Address: 300 Stewart Ave.

Phone: 702-229-2734

Hours: Open Sunday through Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. and Thursday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to midnight

Cost: Included with the cost of admission from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and free after 5 p.m.

The newest speakeasy in Las Vegas comes at the hands of pros who truly know what moonshine, rum running, and secret stashes of moonshine are all about. The Underground at The Mob Museum takes the glamour of the mobster era of past and present with its penchant for brewing and pouring illegal liquor during the Prohibition era and turns it into a 2,814-square-foot speakeasy with its own distillery and VIP room in the basement of the museum.

Sure, it’s a museum, but that means that while patrons imbibe in beer or the museum’s proprietary vodka, gin, and rum, they can get a lesson in bootlegging during that dark, dark period when Prohibition shut down thousands of breweries and distilleries across America.

Only 95 people can fit in the tight space decked out in Art Deco-inspired design motifs, while another 33 can slip inside the distillery exhibit. A working distillery, brewing the museum’s own illicit moonshine made from corn mash in The Fitting Room, hidden behind another secret door, has room for five, and a VIP room accommodates 12.

Inside, the room features a beaded chiffon dress from 1926, as well as a 5-gallon whiskey still, one of the smaller home stills used to make alcohol during Prohibition. A valise with hidden flasks, a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a grape brick sign from California, Budweiser frozen eggs, and a one-gallon ally cooker are just some of the artifacts on display.

The space even features an aquarium with 17 varieties of 100 fish. Tanked created the aquarium that illustrates the story of the Lizzie D, a tugboat that disappeared off the coast of Fire Island, New York, in 1922.

Veteran of the craft cocktail and hospitality industry, Clint Thoman, is The Underground’s food and beverage director.

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