Monday, August 31, 2026

The Top 100 Places to Drink Near Little Alley

  1. Rank 1. Clemente Bar

    Vegan Cocktail Bar


  2. Marble bar, leather chairs, thick linens, and windows looking straight down Fifth Avenue: Ai Fiori is a formal Italian restaurant on the second floor of the Langham Hotel that telegraphs expense account before you've ordered drinks. The kitchen leans Italian with enough invention to keep it interesting, and the room is polished enough that nobody's rushing you. Gracious service throughout lunch and dinner.




  3. Rank 5. Martiny’s

    Japanese Cocktail Bar



  4. Rank 7. Shinji’s

    Japanese Cocktail Bar




  5. Rank 10. Hawksmoor

    British Steakhouse



  6. The ceiling is covered in thousands of clay churchwarden pipes, each one claimed by a regular who never came back to collect it. Keens is an old-school Manhattan steakhouse in Midtown, all dark wood and white tablecloths, and the mutton chop alone has landed on the New York Times list of the city's defining dishes. The porterhouse is USDA Prime, dry-aged in-house, and broiled without apology. It sits at number 68 on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list.



  7. A Flatiron bar tricked out like a 1970s Bangkok shophouse, with vintage televisions and family photos on the walls and Thai cocktails on the menu. The jasmine martini landed on Esquire's list of the best martinis in America, which gives you a sense of how seriously the drinks program is taken. The kitchen keeps pace with late-night Thai food that pairs naturally with the cocktails. Open late, which the neighborhood needed.



  8. Rank 16. Midnight Blue

    Japanese Cocktail Bar


  9. Rank 17. NARO

    Korean


  10. Rank 18. L’Americana

    Italian Coffee Shop




  11. A former antique shop on 33rd Street that now deals in classically built cocktails, organized on the menu by category the way a serious bar should be. This is a two-floor cocktail bar from the late Sasha Petraske's lineage, sibling to Little Branch, with communal high tables downstairs where live jazz pulls in the neighbors, and a looser, loungier room upstairs when you need to actually hear yourself think.


  12. Rank 22. Oiji Mi

    Modern Korean

    A five-course prix fixe of modern Korean cooking in a sleek Flatiron room where the staff outnumbers the guests by a comfortable margin. The chef takes a restrained approach to bold flavors, which sounds like a contradiction until you're eating it. The cocktail program is sharp enough to earn its own following. Michelin awarded it a star, and the James Beard Foundation named the chef a 2025 semifinalist for Best Chef: New York State.


  13. Rank 23. Superbueno

    Mexican Cocktail Bar



  14. Rank 25. Sip & Guzzle

    Innovative Japanese Cocktail Bar


  15. The hand-washing station at the entrance stocks Loewe soap, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Korean fried chicken restaurant. Club music bounces off vaulted ceilings while you work through a bucket of gluten-free fried chicken with consommé, banchan, and frozen yogurt soft serve to finish. Champagne is the obvious pairing, and caviar-topped nuggets are available for anyone who finds the baseline insufficiently absurd. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.



  16. You ring an unmarked bell on an unmarked door below street level, and that's the whole game announced before you've ordered a drink. Inside, this cocktail bar in Chelsea is all deep armchairs, shaded lamps, a fireplace, and curtained alcoves fitted with a buzzer to summon your server when you're ready. It's a speakeasy setup done without irony, and the room is quiet enough that people actually talk to each other.


  17. Rank 29. Little Ned

    Cocktail Bar


  18. Rank 30. NoMad

    Cocktail Bar


  19. The low-slung 19th-century building gets swallowed by Midtown towers on all sides, which somehow makes it feel more defiant. P.J. Clarke's is an old-school Manhattan pub, dark-paneled and unhurried, with a worn mahogany bar, a zinc oyster counter, and photos of former barkeeps watching over things. Nothing much has changed since the gaslight era, and the crowd at the rail seems to prefer it that way.


  20. Rank 32. Smithereens

    New England Seafood

    A subterranean New England seafood joint in the East Village where the menu runs heavily toward the ocean and the wine list follows suit, mostly whites chosen to keep pace with it. The New York Times named it among the city's best new restaurants, and the sommelier took a Next Wave Award. The celery root float has become something of a minor cult object, which tells you something about the kitchen's sense of humor.


  21. The cocktail bar on the second floor of the landmark Metropolitan Life building, where the ceilings are tall enough to make you feel like you should order something serious. The drinks program travels with the restaurant group globally, which keeps the bar from feeling like an afterthought to the dining room below. A polished crowd in no hurry fills the seats most evenings, and the room does most of the work before the first drink arrives.




  22. Rank 36. Thyme

    Cocktail Bar


  23. Rank 37. Borgo

    Italian

    Andrew Tarlow, the restaurateur who more or less invented the Brooklyn communal-table aesthetic, runs his only Manhattan outpost here on East 27th. The neighborhood trattoria seats you at long tables with a daily menu scrawled on butcher paper, and the food leans into the gamy, the bitter, and the slow-cooked, the things that take patience to understand. The New York Times placed it sixth on its 100 Best Restaurants list.


  24. Rank 38. Flatiron Room

    Cocktail Bar


  25. A Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole anchors this small, high-ceilinged hotel cocktail bar inside the St. Regis, and it's been staring down the room since the Golden Age of illustration. The bar's other claim to history is the Bloody Mary, which Fernand Petiot is said to have perfected here. The menu still leans into that, which is either heritage or a hint. Either way, the room is beautiful and the drinks are stiff.



  26. Rank 41. Amor Y Amargo

    Italian Cocktail Bar

    Bitters are both the obsession and the inventory at this tiny East Village cocktail bar, which also sells an overwhelming wall of the stuff to take home. A dozen seats, a menu split between house originals and riffs on classics, and a bespoke option built around a Negroni, Manhattan, or Old-Fashioned if you'd rather just tell them what you're feeling. House-made vermouth pours on tap. A James Beard semifinalist, and the kind of place that makes you feel smarter for having gone.



  27. Rank 43. Katana Kitten

    Japanese Cocktail Bar


  28. There's no sign on Eldridge Street, just a faux tailor's shop window with a glowing "A" and a buzzer you'll wait at long enough to second-guess yourself. This is the cocktail bar that opened in the old Milk & Honey space after Sasha Petraske moved on, and it runs on the same no-menu, tell-us-what-you-like philosophy. North America's 50 Best Bars lists it, and the wait outside on any given night suggests people have read that list.


  29. Concrete floors that look like the previous tenant's linoleum was ripped up last Tuesday set the tone at this spacious Southern-leaning cocktail bar in west Chelsea. Danny Meyer's first standalone bar leans on the spirit of Blue Smoke, which means Sazeracs and bar food with a drawl. The games room in the back suggests the intention is for you to stay a while, and the raw brick walls give you no reason to hurry.


  30. A gilded rat guards the door, which is the first sign you're in the right place. This cocktail bar sits beneath the Andaz 5th Avenue, easy to miss from the street if you're not looking for the discreet sign. Once down the stairs, the room opens into banquettes and long walnut communal tables where a bartender works one side while drinkers take the other three, which collapses the usual bar geography in a quietly clever way.


  31. A fortune-teller in the window is not a gimmick so much as a promise about the evening ahead. Past the red velvet curtains, this art deco cocktail bar on Hudson Street runs to carved wood, marble floors, a tin ceiling, and an onyx fireplace, all of it suggesting you should order something serious and stay a while. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list, which the regulars probably already knew.


  32. Rank 48. Dante

    Italian Cocktail Bar



  33. Rank 50. Angel’s Share

    Japanese Cocktail Bar

    The unmarked door on the second floor of a Japanese restaurant looks exactly like where a broom lives, which is precisely the point. Angel's Share is a speakeasy-style cocktail bar with booth banquettes, bare brick, velvet curtains, and lighting set to confession-booth low. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list, and the room feels like it has always known that. Come early, come two, and find the door before someone else needs the mop.



  34. Rank 52. Bar Goto

    Japanese Cocktail Bar

    The Sakura Martini, a sake-and-gin affair finished with a salted cherry blossom, is the thing people come back for at this tiny, warmly lit cocktail bar on Eldridge Street. Kenta Goto spent years at Pegu Club before opening this place, and the short menu of original drinks leans on Japanese ingredients, house infusions, and a quieter kind of precision. Small enough that nobody is a stranger for long.



  35. Rank 54. Bartolo

    Spanish

    Low ceilings with thick wood beams, amber light, and banquettes that make every table feel like a booth in the back of someone's private club. Bartolo is a Spanish restaurant in the West Village, the kind where you order oxtail braised in red wine and suckling pig and let the table fill up. The martini list has its own following, and the servers are sharp enough to keep a long night moving without making it feel rushed.


  36. Rank 55. Milady’s

    Cocktail Bar



  37. The lobby bar you pass through on your way to somewhere else, bright and airy in that hotel-lounge way that somehow makes you stop anyway. Cocktails lean playful and a little precious, the kind with long ingredient lists and names that make you read them twice. A good spot to settle in before or after dinner upstairs, or to skip the reservation altogether and just drink somewhere that doesn't feel like it's trying too hard.


  38. Rank 58. Maison Premiere

    New Orleans-Style Cocktail Bar

    A four-tap absinthe drip at the center of the bar is a replica of the one at the Absinthe House in New Orleans, and that tells you most of what you need to know. Maison Premiere is a cocktail and oyster bar in Williamsburg that commits fully to the bit: dim golden light, mock antique everything, marble bar top, the faint sense that you've wandered into another city and century. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list, which tracks.



  39. A cocktail bar tucked into what used to be a private office inside Grand Central, designed to look like a 13th-century Florentine palace because its original occupant simply wanted the biggest room in New York. The vaulted ceiling and dark wood do most of the heavy lifting, so the drinks don't need to be extraordinary to make the visit feel like one. Come dressed for it; the room sets a standard and most people read the memo.



  40. Rank 62. Kabawa

    Caribbean

    Paul Carmichael grew up in Barbados, and Kabawa is his argument that Caribbean cooking belongs in any room it wants. A prix-fixe fine dining restaurant on Extra Place, it seats you at a horseshoe counter in a dark green room with mosaic tilework and a playlist sourced partly from Carmichael's cousin back home. The New York Times named it the top restaurant in New York City, and the cocktail bar next door is his too, for nights when the goat patty feels like the right move.


  41. Rank 63. Bar Madonna

    Italian Cocktail Bar




  42. Rank 66. Tigre

    Seafood




  43. Rank 69. Bar Americano

    Spanish/Northern Italian Wine Bar


  44. Rank 70. Dante

    Italian Cocktail Bar


  45. Sapphire velvet banquettes and jacketed servers signal exactly what this is: a fine dining room where Angie Mar fuses classic French technique with her Chinese heritage in a Greenwich Village townhouse that glitters like a jewel box. The cooking leans rich and saucy, the way haute French is supposed to, and a tasting menu is available for those who want the full ceremony. James Beard semifinalist, 2026.




  46. Rank 74. The Dead Rabbit

    Irish Cocktail Bar

    A cocktail bar in the Financial District built around the legend of John Morrissey, a bare-knuckle Irish immigrant who ran one of the city's rougher gangs in the 1800s. The menu reads like a graphic novel, each volume dropping the Rabbit into a new era of New York's murkier chapters. The drinks are theatrical without being silly, and the Irish pub downstairs keeps things grounded for anyone who just wants a pint.


  47. Rank 75. Forty Four

    Cocktail Bar



  48. Leather-bound journals line the shelves of this hushed, clubby cocktail bar near the UN, where wooden monkey sculptures hold the lamps and cigar smoke hangs in the air like a gentleman's agreement. The crescent booths and soft lighting give it the feel of a classic hotel sitting room that decided to serve drinks instead. Jazz plays just loud enough to cover the conversation of the business crowd unwinding after whatever it is they do.


  49. Rank 78. Seirēn

    Spanish-Portuguese Cocktail Bar


  50. Ivy trellises climb the walls of the rooftop bar on the 15th floor, which is the one worth engineering your evening around. Ian Schrager, who gave the world Studio 54 and the Delano, put his stamp on this Gramercy landmark, and the result is three bars across the hotel, each with a crowd dressed like they had somewhere better to be and came here anyway.



  51. The long wooden bar came out of a Pennsylvania mining-town dance hall and has been anchoring this Smith Street cocktail bar ever since. Victorian paneling, a tin ceiling, and a curtained parlor with a fireplace in the back make the whole room feel like someone's very well-stocked study. The cocktails are precise and the eponymous Clover Club is on the menu, naturally. The kind of place that makes Brooklyn feel older than it is.





  52. Rank 85. Bonnie's

    Modern Cantonese

    Calvin Eng's Cantonese restaurant and bar sits on a nondescript east Williamsburg corner, close enough to the BQE that you'll feel the trucks. Inside, it reads like a retro Hong Kong diner, but the kitchen runs modern interpretations of regional Cantonese food, and the MSG Martini earned a spot on Esquire's national list. The Michelin Guide gives it a Bib Gourmand, and the James Beard Foundation named Eng an Emerging Chef nominee.


  53. Rank 86. Dean's

    British Dive Bar




  54. Rank 89. Zou Zou's

    Mediterranean




  55. Rank 92. Theodora

    Mediterranean Seafood

    Wood smoke hangs in the air the moment you walk into this Fort Greene seafood restaurant, which should tell you something about how the kitchen operates. Chef Tomer Blechman anchors the menu around dry-aged fish and open-fire cooking, pulling from a Mediterranean pantry that keeps things interesting without announcing itself. The bar draws a crowd that clearly has opinions about natural wine, and the pita alone justifies showing up early.


  56. Rank 93. PDT

    Cocktail Bar

    You get in by picking up the phone inside a wooden booth at a hot dog joint on St. Marks. If whoever's watching the camera approves, the door buzzes open. PDT is a cocktail bar that takes the speakeasy conceit completely seriously, which is either charming or exhausting depending on your mood, and the line outside suggests most people land on charming. The drinks are the kind of careful, considered pours that made the whole city start doing this.



  57. Rank 95. Rye House

    Cocktail Bar


  58. Rank 96. The Sunken Harbor Club

    Tropical Cocktail Bar


  59. Rank 97. Sauced

    Natural Wine Bar





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