When Lone Wolf opened its doors in the former Lis Bar space in Kingston in the fall of 2023—barely a month after its predecessor, the New Paltz tiki bar Fuchsia Tiki, closed—it looked, from the outside, like another quick pivot in Kingston’s ever-churning bar scene. But if you trace the line of Hudson Valley hospitality back a bit, the story of Lone Wolf is really the story of its proprietor, Anton Kinloch: a culinary-school kid from New Paltz whose path into bartending reads less like a resume than a bildungsroman with garnish.
That narrative found an unexpected bit of validation this month when Kinloch was named one of seven statewide winners of the inaugural Bar Star Awards, part of New York Bartender Week. The awards—judged by a panel of drinks journalists from the US, UK, and South Africa—highlight personal stories from bartenders and barbacks across New York who submitted short written narratives about how they entered and navigated the industry. “It wasn’t really a competition,” Kinloch says. “It was more of an initiative to showcase New York State producers and the people behind the stick.” His entry, charting a career that began at 14 in a local steakhouse and eventually zig-zagged through Michelin kitchens before a sudden detour into beverage operations, landed with the judges. “People like [famed drinks writer] Robert Simonson told me they had no idea my background was this colorful,” he says, sounding both pleased and faintly surprised.
Kinloch is that rare creature in the regional hospitality ecosystem: a Hudson Valley native. He grew up in New Paltz, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, and spent the next dozen years in and out of kitchens from the Hudson Valley to points south. “I’ve always aspired to push the boundaries of the food and drink scene in our region because it’s so diverse and so colorful,” he says. “It’s important that people outside the Hudson Valley recognize the talent here, which is often overlooked.”
His first venture, Fuchsia Tiki, opened in 2019, a cheerful fantasia of rum, citrus, and escapist décor. But when the bar closed in September 2023, Kinloch needed a new project fast. Lone Wolf came together in what he calls “a very quick about-face”—five breathless weeks from key-handoff to opening night. “At the risk of my staff losing their livelihood and myself losing mine, we had to get this place open as quickly as possible,” he says. “We put everything we had into it.”
If Fuchsia was the fruit-forward dream, Lone Wolf is the night-shift reality: a noir-lit, tightly curated cocktail bar that borrows philosophically from the places Kinloch has admired over the years. “Death & Co., Employees Only, PDT…bars where every detail—the training, the menu, the spirits selection—was intentional,” he says. Lone Wolf, he explains, aims to bring that level of deliberateness to Kingston without the performance of seriousness. “We take our program seriously, we take our training seriously, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously,” he says. “We love engaging with guests, making people feel remembered.”
That combination—structure plus spark—is on full display in his New York Bartender Week cocktail, the Electric Rose. Made with Wiltwyck Spirits’ Karnavat vodka, the drink is technically a highball, but its architecture is more elaborate: the base distillate broken down into components, rebuilt with citrus water and quinine, gentian, grapefruit, and topped with fresh Buzz Buttons, the numbing Szechuan flower that delivers a crackling tingle on the tongue. “It made the drink interactive,” he says. “People were coming back just to ask about the Buzz Buttons.”
It’s a tidy encapsulation of Kinloch’s belief that the real currency of bartending is narrative. “When you’re able to tell a story, the product stays with the guest much longer than something transactional,” he says. “You’re giving them a value-add: who made the spirit, how it’s produced, where it comes from. It makes the drink memorable.”
Lone Wolf continues to evolve at speed. “We’re constantly pushing back on our staff, on our processes,” he says. “Trying to create better systems so we can focus more on the hospitality.” With new hires coming in, Kinloch hopes to shift out of survival mode and into creative expansion: spirit dinners, producer spotlights, other programming. “For the first two years, every aspect of the business fell on me,” he says. “Social media, logistics, menu development—everything. Now, with more support, I’m finally going to have some breathing room to do the creative things I’ve wanted to do.”
If the Bar Star Award signals anything, it’s that people beyond Kingston are starting to notice what Kinloch and Lone Wolf have built: a bar with technical finesse, a sense of play, and a bartender who understands that hospitality, like any good story, depends on the telling.
