El Dorado Cocktail Lounge sold to Pouring With a Heart hospitality group

A bartender mixes a drink at El Dorado Cocktail Lounge in East Village.

Dec. 5, 2022 2:45 PM PT

El Dorado Cocktail Lounge, which brothers Nathan, Marshall and Matthew Stanton opened with their lifelong friend Ryan Kurtz in East Village 14 years ago, has been sold to the Pouring With a Heart hospitality group.

El Dorado was one of the city’s first modern mixology focused cocktail lounges when it opened in 2008. Its new owners plan to keep most of the original staff and will refresh the space but plan to honor the history and heritage of the bar at Broadway and 11th Avenue. Pouring With a Heart has owned Seven Grand neighborhood bar in North Park since 2012. The Los Angeles-based company owns more than 25 bars in California, Colorado and Texas.

“There’s a movement in San Diego to secure the future of the establishments that shaped its culinary, cocktail, drinking scene and the unique neighborhood culture of this city,” Peter Stanislaus, chief development officer of Pouring With Heart, said in a statement. “This is the pillar that Pouring With Heart was built on and could not be more in line with our mission as a hospitality group, it is why we are so excited to contribute to this effort with El Dorado, and resurrect the fond memories people have from nights spent there.”

El Dorado will temporarily close in mid-January for a weeklong refresh, during which the bar will transition away from the club/DJ vibe to embrace a more timeless cocktail experience. Visit pouringwithheart.com.

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Pam Kragen

Pam Kragen is the arts and entertainment editor, as well as the chief theater, dining and opera critic, for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She joined the Union-Tribune staff in October 2012 after 27 years at the North County Times, where she served as the Arts & Features Editor, as well as the paper’s longtime arts writer and theater and opera critic. She is the co-founder of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from San Diego State University and completed fellowships in theater criticism at the University of Southern California and opera-classical music criticism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. And in 2022, she was chosen as one of the fellows in the prestigious National Critics Institute, run by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterf, Conn.