Las Vegas Mixtape v9: Liberace Forever, Thirsty Pirates, 25-Cent Bottomless Coffee

Track #3: Stray Pirate @Arts District

Grab a seat at tropical cocktail bar Stray Pirate, the colorful bar that opened this past October in the Arts District. If you order one of their signature creative drinks like “Robbing The Gulf” or “Get It Kraken,” you might notice fish, including a shark, swimming around in what look like aquariums. Wait a second—is that the alcohol taking effect?

Let Chris Gutierrez, partner and creative operator of the buzzy Commerce St bar, clear up the mystery. “We worked with a world-class animator to build our underwater world and have the types of sea life that we wanted to portray on eight screens.” Aha!

Conceptually, Stray Pirate is “located within the hull of a sunken dog pirate ship in the bottom of the ocean,” explains Gutierrez. “The idea of cursed dog pirates in this ship came from my partner and visionary, Kyle Schroeder.”

Stray Pirate’s drinks earn rave reviews. “We use fresh produce for the vast majority of our ingredients,” Gutierrez says proudly. You can enjoy them with the bar’s various snack mixes like “wasabi pea sesame stick rice cracker mix, and half popped garlic parm popcorn,” all of which sound as surreal to me as the shark I saw there.