Ever Andalo

Keeping the glass in step with the pasta bench

The cocktail list has to meet pasta, focaccia, and small plates without crowding them. At Ever Andalo in Charlotte, Colleen Hughes, Cocktail Service Professional, works that edge as Beverage Director for Tonidandel-Brown Restaurant Group, carrying standards across the group while letting each room keep its own cadence. Her station here is not described as a single nightly post behind the bar. It is program work, the kind that shows in proportion, timing, and the way a drink lands beside mushroom tortellini rather than over it.

Hughes is also Head Mixologist at Supperland and manages and bartends at Haberdish, so her oversight stays close to service. That matters at Ever Andalo, where the dining format leans toward shared plates and the bar has to move with a room that can shift from antipasti to pasta to olive oil cake without a formal procession. Her known work includes Pear Supply, a named cocktail from her wider portfolio, and her recognition in 2025 includes a James Beard Award nomination and the MICHELIN Guide American South Exceptional Cocktails Award. At Ever Andalo, the craft is quieter than a trophy line. It is the discipline of a beverage program that knows when to hold tension and when to soften.

A program built for Northern Italian weight

Ever Andalo cooks in a Northern Italian register: house-made pasta, homemade burrata, focaccia, octopus, short rib, and small plates that ask for a glass with shape rather than volume. The wine program is curated, and the cocktail side sits inside the same architecture. A drink has to respect olive oil, mushroom, char, tomato, and dairy; too much sweetness dulls the table, too much bitterness can turn the pass metallic. Hughes’ group role gives the program its frame, but the room gives it its limits.

The kitchen’s method is grounded in traditional cooking with local sourcing, and the restaurant is known for allergy accommodations, including gluten-free pasta and careful changes for guests who need them. That affects the bar as well. A beverage program in this setting cannot behave as ornament; it has to read ingredients, pacing, and texture with the same attention the kitchen gives dough, filling, and sauce. At the counter, that means the first glass should leave room for focaccia. Later, it should still have enough spine for short rib.

Color, pace, and a small room

The room is bright, with colorful wallpaper, elegant touches, and the hum of a NoDa table that has settled in rather than rushed through. Ever Andalo is intimate by scale, lively by noise, and the service style sits in the useful middle: polished enough to keep the sequence clean, relaxed enough for plates to be passed. The counter and the pass feel connected because the menu asks them to be connected. Pasta arrives with the softness of a long method; cocktails have to keep their edges.

That is where Hughes’ work fits the house. She oversees more than one bar program, but Ever Andalo gives the discipline a particular test: Northern Italian comfort in a small Charlotte room, with regulars, allergy conversations, and a table that may order octopus, mushroom tortellini, focaccia, and tiramisu trifle in the same sitting. The last glass still has to belong to Ever Andalo, not to a template carried in from elsewhere.