Our Story

Stone Groove Stillhouse is Anaheim's original Hi-Fi listening bar and vinyl bar - a chef-driven restaurant and working craft distillery founded by Jeff Duggan in the Anaheim Packing District, Orange County. Located inside the historic 1917 MAKE Building, Stone Groove brings together reference-level analog sound, an extensive vinyl experience, proprietary Musically Mastered™ spirits and a scratch-made kitchen. It is not simply a restaurant with records playing or a distillery with a tasting room. Stone Groove was created as a complete listening, drinking and dining experience built around the belief that music deserves to be heard - and felt - at its absolute best.

At Stone Groove, music is never treated as background noise.

The listening environment was conceived with the same seriousness as a recording studio. The sound system, room acoustics, equipment, signal path and physical space were designed as parts of a single instrument. The room itself is a component.

Vinyl records and analog tape are reproduced through a purpose-built high-fidelity system selected for musicality, scale and emotional presence. Every decision serves the same goal: allowing a recording to unfold with the depth, warmth and physical impact its artists intended.

This is what separates Stone Groove from places that become "Hi-Fi bars" by placing a turntable in the corner. This is Anaheim's vinyl bar in its truest form - not a shelf of records for décor, but analog playback treated as the main instrument in the room. We built the entire experience around sound. The bar, seating, lighting and room were created to encourage people to settle in, listen and reconnect with music as something worthy of their full attention.

Stone Groove was built to establish a new benchmark for the modern listening bar—one where uncompromising analog playback, original spirits and serious food exist at the same level.

The restaurant at Stone Groove is not a supporting act. Our kitchen is built around a simple idea: make food people genuinely crave — thoughtful enough to surprise you, familiar enough to pull you back in.

The menu is scratch-made, expressive and designed with intention, drawing from global influences, vegetable-forward cooking, seafood, bold sauces and layered flavors. The goal isn't complexity for its own sake. It's food with personality — recognizable enough to invite you in, but distinctive enough to stay with you after the meal.

Our culinary program is chef-driven. Dishes are created for the way people actually experience Stone Groove: sharing across the table, discovering unexpected combinations and moving naturally between food, cocktails and spirits as the music play.

The kitchen, bar and Musically Mastered™ spirits approach flavor from different directions, then meet in the middle. The objective isn't simply to place great food beside great whiskey and cocktails. It's to create an experience where the food, cocktails, spirits and music make one another more compelling.

At Stone Groove, high fidelity doesn't stop at the speakers.

The connection between music and spirits began with founder Jeff Duggan.

Jeff's life had long followed parallel tracks. He was a drummer, a lifelong music obsessive and an uncompromising believer in the warmth and dimensionality of analog sound. His studies in chemistry and computer science also gave him an instinct for experimentation and a need to understand how things work beneath the surface.

After founding Portola Coffee Roasters and helping advance specialty coffee in Orange County, Jeff turned his attention toward spirits. One question became the foundation for Stone Groove:

Could music do more than shape the atmosphere around a whiskey? Could its physical energy influence the spirit itself?

Jeff began investigating how sound, vibration, frequency and resonance could be introduced directly into the barrel maturation environment. What started as curiosity grew into years of experimentation, engineering and sensory evaluation.

That work became Musically Mastered™, Stone Groove's proprietary, patent-pending, two-stage whiskey-finishing process. Controlled sonic energy creates movement at the boundary between whiskey and oak. A second proprietary stage then promotes further integration, developing greater depth, smoothness, complexity and mouthfeel.

It is not music played casually near a barrel. It is not generic vibration or ultrasonic aging, and it is not intended to replace the role of time. Musically Mastered™ is a purpose-built process combining acoustics, fluid dynamics, barrel chemistry and sensory development.

We describe it this way: The original distillate is the studio track. We engineer the final song.

Each musical genre carries its own sonic signature. Those different patterns of energy allow us to explore how a spirit responds as it is finished. The whiskey is not flavored by music. It is physically shaped through it.

Our obsession with music does not end at the DJ booth. It extends into the way we create our spirits.

Stone Groove occupies the historic MAKE Building, originally constructed in 1917 as the Crawford Marmalade Factory and now part of the Anaheim Packing District.

The location feels especially appropriate. A building once dedicated to transforming California citrus is again home to independent makers. Inside Stone Groove, a high-fidelity listening room, cocktail bar, scratch kitchen and working distillery share one space - each grounded in craft, experimentation and respect for process.

The building's original industrial character remains, but Stone Groove looks forward rather than backward. Vinyl records, analog tape, vacuum tubes and whiskey barrels coexist with new thinking about sound, maturation, cooking and flavor.

It is where Anaheim's history of making things meets an entirely new kind of listening bar. Made Inside a Piece of Anaheim History

Stone Groove is the world's first Audio Stillhouse—a place where music is experienced through both the sound system and the spirits in the glass.

We are a listening bar for people who care deeply about music. We are the home of Musically Mastered™ spirits. We are a chef-driven restaurant and an operating distillery. None of these elements was added simply to decorate the others.

Together, they create something that does not exist anywhere else.

Around here, The Spirit of Music™ is not simply a tagline. It is part of everything we make.

r. Made Inside a Piece of Anaheim History