by Allison Braden

Dot Dot Dot, the jazzy, sultry, surreptitious cocktail bar in Park Road Shopping Center’s backlot, is at odds with owner Stefan Huebner’s boisterous, gregarious personality. Though he can craft and appreciate some of Charlotte’s best cocktails, Huebner is just as likely to be downing Miller High Lifes and shots of Fernet at Plaza Midwood dive Snug Harbor. On a sunny April afternoon, I follow Huebner down a dark hallway into the windowless lounge, whose gold accents, chandeliers, and velvet partitions call to mind Prohibition and covert trysts. But secrecy isn’t Huebner’s style. He sprawls in a booth and says, “I’m an open book.”

Huebner, 50, is among the pioneers of Charlotte’s cocktail scene, but he took a circuitous route to get here. The twists helped him become the bar owner he is now, and he leads a bar that deliberately does things differently than the way the industry operated when he graduated culinary school.

The son of German immigrants, Huebner grew up in New Jersey, then Chicago. He traveled often, sometimes to Europe. “I became a really good cook because my mom wasn’t,” he says. “She makes spaetzle. That’s about it.” As a Gen-Xer coming up in the 1990s, he says, I “I got handed a key in fourth grade and was told to have dinner ready when we get home. My mom would be like, ‘Put this in the oven at 5:30.’” He worked in restaurants in high school, and after graduation, he opted for culinary school.

“I was still going to culinary school when it was the king of the working class,” he reflects. His classmates were ambitious and focused. “Our classes were like 16 people, and all of us wanted to be chefs.”

Huebner had at one time planned to work as a butcher — he had experience in it as a teenager — but realized there wasn’t much money there. He became a trainer for Outback Steakhouse and helped open several locations. “Not my proudest moment,” he says, “but I learned a lot from the industry by doing corporate stuff.” Many years later, those skills — how to read profit and loss statements, how to staff to maximize revenue, how to make money — would help him become a successful owner himself.

At 22, Huebner found himself running a $4.5 million restaurant, an experience that overwhelmed him. “The GM walked in and saw me bawling on a case of lettuce in the walk-in,” he says. “I was having a full-blown meltdown.” The incident was followed by a jarring conversation with his mother. “She was like, ‘I think you should quit because you’re not very nice.’ When your mom says that to you … that was a lot.”

So, he quit and pursued music instead. He joined a band and played more than 800 shows, including at Manhattan’s iconic CBGB club. “It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life for the least amount of money,” he says. But after a while, Huebner aged out of the rock-band lifestyle and ducked out just as the transition to digital began to throw the industry into upheaval. Before he became a working musician, Huebner loved witnessing the magic of live shows. But he’d learned how the magic was made, and shows — both playing or attending — had lost much of their allure.

He pivoted back to hospitality, and became chef at a local steakhouse. One Sunday, he recalls, “everybody had the Jimmy Buffett flu. They all wanted to go to see Jimmy Buffett that night, and everybody called out.” Huebner was the manager on duty that night and bartended to cover for missing staff. “The guys who own Cosmos Cafe came in and sat at the bar. They were about to open Cosmos, and we hit it off.” They told Huebner that he should come work for them. Huebner didn’t have much bar experience, but he didn’t say that. “I basically lied my way into my first bar gig.”

On the job, he learned to mix Jack Daniels and Coke and make lemon drop martinis. His culinary background helped — he likens the five basic spirits to the mother sauces he learned to make in culinary school. There are endless riffs, but the foundations remain consistent. Plus, he says, “I was drinking enough to understand it, see it and figure it out.” At Cosmos, a busy, high-volume bar, Huebner picked up more skills that would come in handy later: multitasking, learning “how to deal with different people, learning to be chameleon.” He ended up working in the thrum of uptown’s growing nightlife scene for 15 years.

Huebner and his business partner, Conrad Hunter, the owner of Foxcroft Wine Co., opened Dot Dot Dot in 2017. (“I make jokes all the time that vodka and Red Bull paid for this.”) At the time, Charlotte didn’t have a thriving cocktail bar scene; the best cocktails came out of restaurant bars. Huebner saw value in being in the vanguard. He might not get everything right — those who go first rarely do — but, he says, “there’s a level of authenticity and legitimacy.”

Since Huebner graduated from culinary school, the industry has evolved away from the abusive working conditions that kitchens can be known for. He’s grateful to have witnessed the evolution; young people, he says, don’t know what it used to be like. And he’s proud of the part he’s played. “I like to think of myself, at least on the local level, as one of those people who have helped swing that door,” he says, “from that militant, crappy, pot-throwing line-cook world to a level of looseness but professional, where no one’s scared of anybody. Everybody’s welcome. Everything’s cool.”

Since opening six years ago, the bar has only had 13 bartenders, what Huebner calls an unheard-of retention rate in the service industry. He mops. He takes out the trash. He leads by example. The way Huebner sees it, his staff are helping provide for his daughter. “I’m very appreciative of the people who are here,” he says. “It’s like, people want time off. We give them time off.” And he makes sure that they earn well. “I’m a firm believer that if the house makes money, everybody makes money.”

Huebner has found his home in bars, and unlike with music, they haven’t lost their magic. Superb drinks at other bars still surprise him, and the creativity he feels behind his own bar keeps him coming back. He looks around at the bar he’s built and admits that it doesn’t echo his personality. So what does it reflect? “Maybe,” he says, “the person I want to be.”

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