Harmony Hi-Fi, Cleveland — A Vinyl Listening Bar on Fulton Road

Where the record sets the tempo — a vinyl listening bar in Ohio City, Cleveland

By Rafi Mercer

New Listing

Venue Name: Harmony Hi-Fi
Address: 2054 Fulton Rd, Cleveland, OH 44113, United States
Website: https://harmonyhificle.com/
Instagram: @harmonyhificle

For about six months, the ground floor at 2054 Fulton Road belonged to a sushi bar. Kyuu-juu closed at the end of December, and for a short while the room stood between lives, as rooms on busy Ohio City streets tend to, briefly and without fuss. By March it had new tenants and a different purpose. The new one asks more of the people who walk in.

Christine Somrak and Danny Chedid took the space on. Somrak traces the idea to Chicago, to a vinyl bar called Parachute, where the format caught her. She traces it further back too, to childhood and a family sitting around the record player. She talks about music you can hold. That is the root of the whole thing. A record is an object before it's a sound, and Harmony Hi-Fi is built by people who never forgot that.

The system came next. Brian Gresham, who used to run Take 5 Rhythm and Jazz downtown, advised the owners on how the room should sound. They settled on McIntosh. Gresham has said the components are as handsome to look at as they are to hear, and he was clear about what the room is not. "It's not a loud sound," he told Cleveland Magazine, and drew the line between this and a DJ blasting a crowd. Volume is the easiest tool a bar has. Leaving it alone takes conviction.

The house rules are short and they mean it. Full sides, not playlists. No requests. The crates run through soul, jazz, funk, hip-hop and R&B, with room left for the occasional left turn, and the record, start to finish, sets the pace of the evening. Talk stays low and the lights go lower. Cleveland Scene called it kissa-style when it opened, and the lineage is there in the discipline, though this isn't a silent room. It's a social one at lounge volume, where the music is allowed to lead and the room follows.

Even the drinks point back to the turntable. Every cocktail carries a song's name: The Thrill Is Gone, Give Up the Funk, Bad Medicine. It's a small thing, and a clever one. You think of a record before you've tasted anything. Behind the pass, chef Terrell Locklear cooks small plates with a soul lean, things like chargrilled oysters, salmon bites, grilled wings and lamb lollipops. The food is made for sharing across a slow set rather than for breaking the set up.

Harmony Hi-Fi isn't arriving alone. Cleveland has been gathering a small scene of hi-fi rooms where cocktails, food and careful audio sit together, and Cleveland Magazine has written about it as a wave. What separates this one is scale and intent. The owners describe a neighbourhood living room, not a venue. There are no reservations and no cover. You walk in, from four in the afternoon every day, and stay until midnight in the week, eleven on Sundays, one o'clock on Fridays and Saturdays. The room is built for coming back, which says more about it than anything else here.

The website gives a single piece of direction for finding the door. After dark, look for the glow. It's an odd instruction for a bar to give, and a good one. Somewhere past that light a needle is down on side one, and someone has decided you'll hear the whole of it. The old sushi counter has gone. What's held in the hand has changed too. The care is the same.

I write about spaces like this one in the Tracks & Tales Daily. Subscribe to hear about new rooms first, or read more venues from the listening bar map.

— Rafi Mercer