Carl Radke Prepares His Summer House Contingency Plan

Let’s get this out of the way first: Soft Bar does exist. Or, okay, it’s at least on its way to existing. The day I visit its Greenpoint location for an interview with founder and owner Carl Radke, the site is an active construction zone, with a team hard at work transforming the expansive warehouse space into its next life as a sober bar and café. While giving me a quick tour, Radke breaks down his enthusiasm for the location: its layout (long and narrow with 23-foot ceilings) and the neighborhood surrounding it. He shares concept art for what the finished setup will look like, including mint-green swatches for the custom concrete bar that will run from the front of the space to the façade outside. The opening is planned for August, which conveniently would coincide with the end of filming for season ten of Summer House, the Bravo reality series about a group of friends spending their summer at a share house in the Hamptons that Radke has starred on since its 2017 premiere.

Months before it’s set to welcome customers, Soft Bar already has its fair share of doubters. There’s a proud tradition of Bravo stars promoting businesses that never come to fruition beyond a story line, meaning Radke has more to prove than the average proprietor. He may also have been overly ambitious with his timeline, though he notes that last summer’s launch party, which aired on an episode of Summer House season nine, was “really just to announce this brand and what we’re building.” At another point on the show, he mentioned he was hoping for a January 2025 opening. “I am learning a lot about certain things in this arena,” he confesses.

Beyond the broader strokes of businesses associated with Bravo, doubts about Soft Bar reflect some uncertainty about its owner. Summer House viewers have observed an air of aimlessness tied to Radke, especially after he got sober in January 2021 and struggled to chart a career path outside of Loverboy, the drink company founded by his close friend and co-star Kyle Cooke. On season eight of the show, Radke butted heads with then-fiancée Lindsay Hubbard, who demanded more ambition from him and immediately nixed his idea for starting a sober sports bar. “It was niche, what I was describing,” he concedes. “I didn’t have a lot of meat on that bone.”

Radke’s life has changed dramatically since that fateful conversation, one of many cracks in the Hubbard-Radke union that ended in a messy broken engagement in the final episode of season eight (she claims she was “blindsided” by the on-camera confrontation, while he disputes her version of events). Season nine opened with Hubbard announcing to the house her pregnancy with a new partner, with a late-arriving Radke awkwardly congratulating her. Hubbard predicted Radke would be walking on eggshells around her all summer — “Absolutely I was on eggshells,” he confirms, at least in those early episodes — but Radke says filming the season was easier than it looked. “It felt like a great chance to heal, get some closure — even more closure than I already had — and get back to having fun with my friends,” he says.

Radke and Hubbard managed to keep things civil throughout most of season nine, though he doesn’t think they’ll ever be friends again. At the reunion, he acknowledged that he still misses his ex’s friendship; probed by Andy Cohen, Hubbard said she’s not there yet. Now, Radke tells me, “I think it ended where it was supposed to.”

For his part, Radke maintains that his mostly zen approach to Hubbard during season nine was both his truest self and the person he strives to be. That’s not to say he never gets upset, he admits, though the only time I spot a flash of resentment is when I ask about his decision to share on the show that he hadn’t had sex in the year since his engagement ended. “Well, apparently I was playing victim by saying that,” he says, referring to Hubbard’s response. “I was not trying to do that in any shape or form.”

His since-broken celibacy may be something of a sore subject, given the context. As he explained on the show, it had a lot to do with not feeling ready to let in someone new. But it was also grounded in his insecurity about being cast as the villain after the breakup. Over the course of season eight, viewer perception wavered on the subject of whether Radke or Hubbard was more at fault — an admittedly flawed rubric for understanding a failed relationship — but there was ample vitriol hurled Radke’s way throughout. It didn’t help that the breakup occurred hot on the heels of Vanderpump Rules’s era-defining Scandoval. Even if Radke wasn’t Tom Sandoval, he was still lumped together under the “bad Bravo men” umbrella by many audience members, particularly those protective of Hubbard.

“I wasn’t feeling confident to go date. Who would want to have sex with me? That’s how I felt a lot last year, like I was worthless,” he recalls. “I went through this big breakup. I’m 39, I’m single, I’m launching this new business … Who would want to be with this? In my head, nobody. So why would I even try to work past that drama?”

Radke’s step back from romantic relationships was also tied to his status as a recovering addict. He got into a relationship with Hubbard before a full year of sobriety, which bucks the conventional wisdom of recovery. On the Summer House after-show, co-star Lexi Wood revealed that Radke told her he wanted to do that year of abstinence belatedly in order to focus on himself and his sobriety without the distraction of romance. In our conversation, Radke shares that he had an alcohol and cocaine problem without realizing it well before Summer House started, noting that addiction and mental illness run in his family. His brother, Curtis, died from a heroin overdose in August 2020, which made Radke spiral further into substance abuse until his rock bottom the following January. Shortly after a “horrible night” when Radke “called a lot of people I shouldn’t have” and threatened his own life, Cooke came over and told him that he needed to get help.

“Having a best friend look you in the eye and tell you you’re gonna die — I had to take it seriously,” Radke recalls. Now, he continues to attend AA meetings and work with a sponsor. “It’s about staying alive,” he adds bluntly.

Radke’s sobriety has put him in an interesting position on Summer House. Almost all Bravo reality shows include cast members drinking to excess, but Summer House has been especially dominated by partying. “Summer should be fun!” Cooke famously declared in season two, and “fun” for this cast has historically involved copious amounts of alcohol. “We were a really boozy group of friends,” Radke says. “I felt like we hit it harder than most other people would, because early on in the show, we didn’t know what was going on. We were just having fun.”

While he never imagined he would be doing Summer House sober, Radke says that what viewers see now is a “more authentic version” of who he really is. “The Carl on the weekend was not always the Carl I knew. He definitely would use substances as a bit of a cloak,” Cooke said at the reunion. “He’s so much more confident now.”

Much of that confidence is reflected in the way Radke talks about his current business venture. However slapdash his future plans may once have seemed on the show, he is laser focused when he speaks about Soft Bar in its current iteration. He knows the pitfalls of opening a brick-and-mortar, but having an actual location is fundamental to his vision for Soft Bar: a destination for people to gather, talk, work, and otherwise exist, all without alcohol. Sober bars in New York, he says, are usually only open on the weekends and not until later in the day; coffee shops tend to close early. For people interested in coffee alternatives like matcha, cacao, and mushroom blends, there are fewer in-person options. On Summer House, Soft Bar has largely sounded like the kind of sober bar that already exists — zero-proof cocktails in a dive-y or more upscale atmosphere — albeit in limited form (in part because of the financial realities of a business that can’t rely on priced-up alcohol for revenue). In reality, Radke is imagining more of a hybrid model that welcomes customers morning, afternoon, and evening, with different menu options depending on the hour. “What about just a cool place that you can go any time of day?” Radke says. “I realized it was more than sports. It’s a lifestyle that I still think is missing.”

With that in mind, the space is designed for patrons sharing experiences with each other. “People are looking for friend connections, dating connections, professional connections, without the influence of alcohol,” he adds. “A lot of places in our city I don’t think provide that as well as they could.” Naysayers are inevitable when it comes to an alcohol-free space, but Radke has given up on the idea that he can change every mind. He does, at least, address my specific concern about soft cocktails — Soft Bar doesn’t use the term mocktail because “we’re not making fun of anything” — which in the past have made me feel like I’m spending $18 for juice in a fancy glass.

“My experience in drinking mocktails is, they’re typically sugary. They’re whatever the bartender can put together, kind of haphazardly,” Radke says. “We use premium ingredients. We use sophisticated bartending techniques — milk punching, fat washing.” The soft cocktails won’t be cheap, but they won’t be $18 either, he stresses, while also pointing out that there will be less pricey drink options for people who balk at spending more than $10 on any booze-free beverage.

Soft Bar is currently the overwhelming focus of his daily life; meanwhile, the future of Summer House is in limbo. Breakout star Paige DeSorbo, who joined in season three, announced her departure in a June 5 Instagram post, and it’s hard to imagine Hubbard, now with a 5-month-old daughter, returning for another season full-time. (“I’ll be out there in the Hamptons,” Hubbard said at the reunion. “I mean, I don’t know if I’ll be living at the house every weekend.”) For Radke and Cooke, the latter of whom will turn 43 this summer, there’s the question of how long they can keep doing this. There have been recent rumblings about the possibility of a new Summer House series, a New York City–set show about these longtime friends at a different stage in their lives, similar to what Bravo did by spinning off The Valley from Vanderpump Rules. “I can certainly foresee maybe focusing on our careers more and in New York,” Radke says when asked about the possibility of not returning to Summer House proper. “But I don’t know. I mean, me and Kyle definitely got some more fun in us in the Hamptons.”

Should Bravo decide to shift Radke and his fellow elder millennial co-workers to a new career-centric series, Soft Bar becomes a natural story line for Radke. For the time being, though, he’s letting the space exist as something independent from his reality career — and whatever baggage might be attached to that.

“It’s not Carl’s Soft Bar. It’s not Bravo’s Soft Bar. It’s a real business, a real brand. If Bravo were to end tomorrow,” he says, taking in his surroundings, “this is still going to be going on.”