Carry On

Balance before the cabin door closes

A Pink Squirrel can turn thin if the sweetness leads. Jax Donahue, Cocktail Service Professional at Carry On in Phoenix, works in the tighter register: balance first, scene second, then the drink. Since 2024, Donahue has shaped beverage direction for Pretty Decent Concepts with a preference for polished classics, clear structure and a room-aware sense of theatre. At Carry On, that work meets a bar built around a 90-minute airplane-themed cocktail experience, with ticketed seatings and destination-led menus that borrow their mood from luxury air travel of the 1960s-1970s.

The lineage here is not presented as a long apprenticeship under a named predecessor. What the house does state is a present-tense discipline: Donahue’s program revisits familiar bar forms, including the Pink Squirrel, Tequila Sunrise and Rusty Nail, without treating nostalgia as permission for looseness. The role is one of calibration. A drink has to read quickly in a room with its own script, but it still has to hold on the palate. That is the useful tension at the station.

Classic forms tightened for flight

The program at Carry On is minimal in wine and more exacting at the bar, where the cocktail list carries the weight of the experience. Donahue’s stated method for Pretty Decent Concepts works in two registers: recognizable classics, made cleaner and more deliberate, and drinks tied to featured destinations through local ingredients. The first register gives the guest a known shape. The second gives the glass a place to land.

That matters in a room where the menu has to do more than decorate a theme. A Tequila Sunrise can lean on color and memory; Donahue’s task is to make the build feel intentional rather than borrowed. A Rusty Nail brings its own period signal, but the measure is whether the drink keeps its spine. The same is true of a Pink Squirrel, a cocktail with enough sweetness and creaminess to lose focus if the hand relaxes. Carry On asks those drinks to sit inside a precise 90-minute arc, not as props, but as part of the pass.

The bar as private jet cabin

The room is warm with burnt orange, brown and cream, the palette of a private jet cabin remembered through the 1970s rather than copied from a museum. Plush seating lowers the posture. Conversation can stay conversational. The glamour is close to the body: the back bar, the seat, the glass set down within the timing of the service.

Carry On’s intimacy changes the labor. In a large bar, a drink can disappear into volume; here, the scene keeps returning to the hands. The destination menu, the aviation cues and the polished classics all have to meet at the same counter. Donahue’s work is to keep that meeting from becoming cluttered. The cabin can carry the nostalgia, but the balance has to come from the Pink Squirrel.