New York City Bars That Have Stood the Test of Time

New York has arguably cycled through more important craft cocktail bars in the last two decades than any other city. That’s fitting for the town where, beginning in 1987, bartender Dale DeGroff kicked off the cocktail revival from his perch inside the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center; and where, starting in 2000, Sasha Petraske reinterpreted the cocktail bartender’s art to fit inside an unmarked tenement along Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side.

The latter bar still survives, after a fashion. It sailed as Milk & Honey when Petraske ran it, from 2000 to 2012, a place of meticulously crafted drinks, rules of decorum, elegantly attired bartenders, candles, and jazz. After Petraske bequeathed the space to longtime bartenders Michael McIlroy and Sam Ross, it became Attaboy. But the culinary and service standards remained the same, even if T-shirts replaced the vests. Attaboy recently expanded into the space next door, making the bar twice as big as it once was.

The bar that most fed Petraske’s vision, Angel’s Share, is also still around, albeit at a different address than its original Stuyvesant Street second-story digs at the back of an izakaya. It was founded in 1993 by Tony Yoshida, an immigrant from Japan who had the idea to hide the bar away; to formalize the cocktail experience; to post a list of house rules; and to emphasize ice quality and optics. Angel’s Share is now in the West Village and run by Tony’s daughter Erina. It is the godfather of New York’s now expansive Japanese American cocktail bar scene.

Milk & Honey’s speakeasy aesthetic was echoed at PDT, which was opened in 2007 by bartender Jim Meehan and Brian Shebairo, who wanted to turn the basement space next to his hot dog joint into a bar.

PDT was even smaller than Milk & Honey and you entered through an old telephone booth. But whereas Petraske became famous and popular by eschewing press, PDT accomplished the same end by embracing it. Both classic and original cocktails were offered at PDT, while the self-seriousness of the place was punctured a bit by a food menu of hot dogs and tater tots.

Not far away is the equally clandestine and craft-serious Death & Co. It was co-founded in 2006 by cocktail novice David Kaplan, whose opening staff included many of the original bartenders of the trailblazing Pegu Club, including Phil Ward and Brian Miller. Like PDT, the joint emphasized original creations and was a hot property from the get-go. It also proved to be the most business-minded of the early cocktail bars, evolving into a national chain (D.C., Los Angeles, Denver, and a Seattle location opening this year) with a line of merch and cocktail books.

The legacy of Julie Reiner is still on display in New York, even if Pegu Club, which she opened with Audrey Saunders, and her other early bar, Flatiron Lounge, have closed. Clover Club, which Reiner debuted in 2008, was the first important craft cocktail bar in Brooklyn. It embodies the streamlined service models she pioneered at Flatiron, as well as the all-are-welcome populism that has always been her hallmark.

Finally, there’s Employees Only, which was opened in 2004 by a group of five men, born variously in the Balkans, New Orleans, and the New York area. The white-jacketed bartenders drew more on European models than the American cocktail renaissance, but the party atmosphere has always been pure Manhattan. Of all the New York cocktail bars that opened in the aughts and are still around, it has changed its stripes the least. But then, why fix an unbroken queue?