I’m standing on a busy street in downtown Phoenix, surrounded by skyscrapers. I’m in an alcove at the foot of an office building, looking at a bright orange door. Above the door, there’s a sign. It says, “Now boarding.”
"I’d love to welcome you in to Carry On. So this is our 747, airplane-themed concept, more directed to that 1960s and '70s flow. We tried to make the concept itself as realistic as we could when it came to an old school airliner of the time," said Jax Donahue
Donahue is one of the founders of Carry On. Donahue has long hair that he keeps pulled back in a ponytail, a thick, well-groomed beard and a sleeve of tattoos running down his arm. He's also a James Beard Foundation semifinalist in the Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service category this year.
He leads me through the jetway door, and on the other side, we find ourselves standing next to the metallic exterior of a 747. Donahue explains that, if this were a regular night at Carry On, this is where I’d hand a paper ticket to a steward.
"And when you come in, we do stamp the tickets, like you would’ve had, and tear them for you, and actually hand them off," he said.
The goal of all this immersive staging, he tells me, is to recreate the experience of catching a flight in the 1960s.
"Getting back to that luxury, that, 'I wanna have a martini and enjoy my experience of flight,' rather than just, you know, getting from Point A to Point B," he said.
We step into the cabin. The light is low and golden-hued. The walls are dotted with recessed windows that look exactly like airplane windows. Beneath the windows are plush leather banquettes and sleek cocktail tables surrounded by swiveling captain’s chairs. At the far end of the room is a bar, staffed by what Donahue refers to as a pilot.
"As you can see, Zack is fully dressed in his attire, striped up, beautiful skinny tie," Donahue said.
When Donahue says Zack is “striped up,” he’s not kidding. The pilot uniform looks pretty authentic — there’s a hat with a gold crest and striped epaulettes on the shoulders of Zack’s shirt. Behind the bar, there’s a woman named Olivia, who Donahue calls a stewardess. She wears a miniskirt, leather boots and a scarf.
"I will say our stewards and pilots do a fantastic job also of staying in character as best as they can," said Donahue.
"I notice you’re calling them pilots and stewards, not bartenders and servers," I said.
"Nope. We don’t do that," said Donahue.
Donahue invites me to sit in one of the captain’s chairs. It’s really comfortable. He offers me a cocktail — he says every passenger gets one as soon as they sit down. I sipped a strawberry-infused cocktail with hibiscus, mamet and lemon. It was delicious.
Then we hear from the captain.
"Good evening ladies and gentleman. This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Carry On Airlines! Heard of us? Of course you have, that’s why you’re here. We’re just about ready for takeoff," he said.
As the captain’s voice plays over nested speakers in the ceiling, the seat starts rumbling underneath me, mimicking the rumble of an airplane engine. In the windows, screens start playing a realistic video of a runway, with buildings racing past as the plane picks up speed and takes off. As the video shows the the ground receding and being replaced by clouds, Donahue tells me about the rest of the cocktail menu.
"Wow, does the old fashioned really have brown butter in it?" I asked.
"It does — it’s a brown butter flat wash bourbon that we use for that cocktail specifically, with a very interesting wormwood and balsamic syrup, that’s pretty darn good. There’s a little bit of salt in there as well. It’s tasty," said Donahue.
Donahue is fascinated by the booze culture of the mid-20th century. It was, in his words, “the death of the cocktail.”
"People were imbibing in a different way. It was the '60s and '70s, so you have a lot of people ... really goin’ off the grid and experimenting more with other things. And so they had cocktails that wanted to go along with it," he said.
"Your cocaine, your LSD," I added.
"Exactly — what is the best way to get those things hittin’ real quick? Sugary sweet drinks. And that’s where that whole era of cocktail were created," Donahue said.
This, Donahue says, was the time of the colorful drink — cerulean Blue Hawaiians and glowing green Midori sours. Donahue, who designed all the drinks at Carry On, sees these recipes as a challenge: preserving the gaudy style of their presentation, but infusing them with things like brown butter and balsamic syrup. After they down their welcome drink during take-off, Carry On passengers can choose from a wide range of period-specific classics with a similarly elevated twist: Harvey Wallbangers, jungle birds, rusty nails, tequila sunrises. Eventually, there will also be a third round of drinks, but that comes later, after the captian speaks again.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, just a quick heads-up, we’re coming up on a little turbulence ahead, just a few bumps," he said. "I know a few of you are probably looking forward to a few bumps ..."
Right on cue, the seat starts vibrating a bit more intensely, and the engine sounds start to rattle. Once the captain makes it through the rough patch, he comes back to the intercom.
"We have left the turbulence! Now because we are entering a smooth sailing with clear skies ahead, that can only mean one thing: martini time! I am so jealous!" he said.
Olivia, along with the other stewards and stewardesses, starts moving down the aisle with the drink carts, mixing up martinis in penguin-shaped shakers. The penguin is Carry On’s mascot.
"We definitely wanted to make a flightless bird the logo. It’s kind of a funny thing," Donahue said.
It’s a pretty good joke, but for Donahue, it also seems like it’s connected to something deeper. The reason he and his colleagues are so obsessive about the details at Carry On.
"Well, it’s interesting, you know, I mean. This environment that we’re sitting in is from a time when flying on a plane was still kind of remarkable," I said.
"It was, and that’s what we’re getting towards. And it’s funny. We still all want to transport ourselves in some way shape or form. We are not birds, we don’t fly. So as humans, the fact that we can get from point A to point B sometimes thousands of miles away is pretty remarkable. And people sometimes do that in sweatpants with headphones on, and don’t think twice about it," Donahue said.
Donahue says Carry On is partly inspired by the first time he flew on an airplane, when he was 4 years old.
"I didn’t have a phone to entertain me on the plane, I looked out the window," he said.
"Yeah — you were just like, 'Oh my God. I’m in the sky!'" I said.
"I’m in the sky — look at that, that’s a super cool mountain! There’s a lake, there’s this — like, those little moments that we don’t necessarily have — or maybe, it’s not that we don’t have. It’s just — we take them for granted sometimes," said Donahue.
"Yeah, I said. The version of that you’re getting at here is like, 'What if there was a 1970s plane on the ground in downtown Phoenix?' It’s as weird to be in this environment here as it once was to be on a plane, which is now normal."
"Exactly," Donahue said.
