The Best Places in New York

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A red light above an unmarked door in a Chelsea coffee shop is the only signal that there's a cocktail bar behind it. Once through, the room opens into flocked wallpaper, fringed lampshades, and an antique copper bathtub sitting squarely in the middle of things, which everyone photographs and then pretends they weren't going to. The seven-seat copper bar is the calmer alternative. Dressed-up but not stiff, and a long way from the espresso machine out front.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A basement cocktail bar in the Financial District with dark red walls, a chandelier, and macramé screens that somehow land between 1980s lounge and faint tiki, all packed into semicircular banquettes that seat over a hundred. The inventive menu carries the fingerprints of the Death & Co. team. On quieter weeknights they may seat you at the bar only, which is worth knowing before you bring a crowd.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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The bar curves like the stern of a Spanish galleon, which should tell you what kind of night to expect. This candlelit cocktail lounge off the TriBeCa steakhouse of the same name leans into the drama: heavy drapes, tapestry walls, shaded pendant lights, and booths deep enough to disappear into. The back bar is loaded with premium spirits, and the Key Lime Pie cocktail was invented here, for better or worse.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Red Hook sits off every subway line, which keeps Fort Defiance comfortably local. This all-day neighborhood bar fits eight tables and a bar counter that seats twelve if everyone breathes in. The name nods to a nearby Revolutionary War fort that once blocked the British from the East River, which gives the place more historical gravitas than most spots this relaxed have any business claiming.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The glowing floor stayed when the Hudson Hotel's Library Bar got its makeover, but the furniture got considerably more fashionable. This cocktail bar swings between loud dance music and live jazz depending on the night, with exposed brick, low tables, and lighting that flatters everyone equally. It's the kind of flirty hotel bar where the room does most of the work, and nobody seems to mind.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The horseshoe bar juts into the middle of the room like it owns the place, which, given the brown panelled walls and tasselled awning overhead, it kind of does. This St Marks dive bar closed for a few years and came back with its 1970s bones intact, including a mural salvaged from its earlier life as a burlesque lounge. A snack-food mogul bought the building, which is a sentence that belongs here and nowhere else.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. The New York Times The Restaurant List
2. James Beard Awards 2023 · Semifinalist · Best Chef: New York State · Sol Han

Bare brick walls, worn-down bar, and a chalkboard listing three or four cocktail specials that change daily, because a printed menu would be too much of a commitment. This Spring Street cocktail bar reads like a neighborhood dive that happens to employ people who could be working somewhere far fancier. Industry folk fill the stools by night, talking shop with bartenders who clearly know what they're doing. Bring cash, skip the attitude, and just ask what's good.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The Circle Bar sits on the top floor of this famously members-only Meatpacking District club, its zinc-topped bar jutting into a room of herringbone parquet and enormous Chesterfield sofas. The glass-walled wine cellar is purely decorative, but it sets the mood. Cocktails arrive at low tables where people who definitely knew the right person to get in are trying to look like they didn't have to.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The big tray chicken arrives in a wok the size of a hubcap, bird parts submerged in hot oil with enough Sichuan peppercorns to rearrange your face. This tiny Chinatown noodle cafe runs on Henan hand-stretched wheat noodles, and the brisket topping is the move. The room is small, the tables fill fast, and the bill stays low enough that you can afford to order the garlicky cucumbers without doing any math.

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The entrance reads "Lower East Side Toy Company" on an iron gate, which is not a toy company. Beyond it, a semi-subterranean passage runs between buildings toward an unmarked door with a brass peephole, and yes, the rats are part of the atmosphere. One of the few surviving Prohibition-era speakeasies in the city, this bar on the Lower East Side commits hard to the bit, and the whole approach feels like a dare before you've ordered anything.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The cocktail menu changes daily and gets announced on a letter board covering the back wall, which is either charming or anxiety-inducing depending on how decisive you are. This small cocktail bar shares an entrance with restaurant Public and the same drinks program, a compact room made to feel larger by a floor-to-ceiling mirror above leather booths. Regulars arrive knowing roughly what they want; everyone else reads the board.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A cocktail bar tucked into the back of the Iroquois Hotel lobby, the Lantern's Keep still reads like the private dining room it once was: dark paneling, marble-topped tables, and five seats at the bar. The menu organizes its drinks by technique rather than spirit, and the staff actively prefer you skip it entirely and just describe what you're after. For 44th Street, that level of calm feels almost conspiratorial.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

No website, no phone number, and nothing on the exterior but a small street number and white tiles that read more like a morgue than a cocktail bar. Weather Up in Prospect Heights commits fully to the bit. Inside, those same tiles climb the ceiling over a zinc-topped wooden bar with sculptural stools, turning the whole room into something between a former bathhouse and a very stylish fever dream.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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A multi-roaster coffee shop tucked into an airy high-rise lobby near the Holland Tunnel, which is not a sentence you expect to lead somewhere good, but here we are. The shelves rotate through a rotating cast of specialty roasters, the menu stays short and efficient, and the lobby has enough room to spread out, plug in, and stay far longer than you planned. Good pastries, no guilt about the outlet use.

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1. The New York Times 2022 · Critic's Pick · Restaurant Review
2. Spirited Awards 2023 · Regional Honoree · Best U.S. Hotel Bar – U.S. East

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The lobby of the Classic Stage Company turns out to be a fine place for a coffee shop, all spare seats and big windows that beg you to watch people cross 13th Street. Everyman is a no-frills espresso bar pulling beans roasted by Black and White out of North Carolina, with Colson pastries from Brooklyn if you need something to eat. The staff are warm in a way that makes the spartan room feel intentional rather than unfinished.

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A gallery of cow portraits on the wall sets the tone at this no-frills Park Slope coffee shop, which does not take itself too seriously but does take espresso seriously. Black & White roasts come out of a small, sunny space with tile backsplash, a handful of stools, and Colson pastries for the indecisive. The staff know what they're doing, which in this neighborhood is less common than it should be.

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An Italian American restaurant in Midtown that has been a fixture for Midtown media types and political regulars since the nineties, run by the Scotto family with the kind of front-of-house warmth that makes you feel like the reservation mattered. The linguine vongole and a chopped salad are the moves. Arrive late and you may find a DJ has materialized, followed shortly by a conga line, which is not something most pasta dinners promise.

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1. Eater Essential Ice Cream Shops in New York City

A Korean pub from the team behind Golden Diner, where the viral pancakes made the place famous. Here the drinks come first, running from martinis and milk punch to Korean spirits and low-ABV options, and the food is built to keep up with them. Fried wings in gochujang glaze, dumplings a few ways, raw bar picks, and savory pancakes that borrow from both sides of that tradition fill out a menu that has no interest in being subtle.

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1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
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Two benches out front are famous enough to appear in the logo, which tells you something about how long this West Village coffee shop has been part of the neighborhood. Joe Coffee Company roasts its own beans in Long Island City and piles the pastry case high with muffins and quickbreads. It has the warm, unhurried feel of a place where regulars know the staff by name, which in New York passes for a small miracle.

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Wine carafes priced the way carafes should be priced, and octopus skewers landing on paper-covered tables beside tzatziki and spanakopita, all of it meant for sharing. Kiki's is a neighborhood Greek taverna on the Lower East Side that got so popular the team opened an identical spot across the street for overflow, which is either very practical or very on-brand for the neighborhood. Usually easy to get a table, which says something.

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1. The New York Times 2020 · 3 stars, Critic's Pick · Restaurant Review
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The restaurant attached to Hauser & Wirth's Soho gallery, Manuela runs lunch, dinner, and brunch inside an interior wild enough to distract you from the menu. The original location in Los Angeles keeps live chickens on the premises; New York wisely does not. The all-day menu leans Mediterranean-ish, crudo and carpaccio giving way to grilled fish and roasted lamb, the kind of food that photographs well and also tastes like food.

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