Angel's Share
Tony Yoshida opened this bar in 1993 and put a Tokyo cocktail room inside an East Village izakaya. Sasha Petraske drank there and ever after cited it as an influence on Milk & Honey. A landlord took the room in 2022. His daughter Erina reopened it on Grove Street. The cherub mural came out of the old wall and went up in the new one.
Why go
The rules are posted the way they always were. PUNCH watched them hand-carve ice out of a block in 2017, at the old address.
The bar has poured "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" since the early years. It runs bourbon, aromatized wine, herbal liqueur, bitters and smoke. "Dirty Dancing" is newer, built on gin with shiso-infused shochu, house pickle juice and Chinese onion essence.
Order this / avoid
- Order: "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" if you want the bar as it was.
- Order: "Dirty Dancing" if you want what the bar is doing now.
- Avoid: turning up five-handed, or expecting to stand. Walk-ins only, four to a party, and they will not split you.
What locals & experts say
- Ben Rojo, senior bartender, to PUNCH in October 2017, on the original room:
We draw much of our technique and aesthetic from the focused, detail-oriented style that has characterized Japanese bartending for the last century,
and yetwe view ourselves as an inextricably New York bar
with ahybridized house style.
2 - North America's 50 Best Bars, 2026: the bar enters at No.31, and the body's own write-up credits it with introducing a generation of New Yorkers to Japan's drinks heritage.1
Good to know
- Getting in: closed Sundays and Mondays.
- The room: 45 Grove Street in the West Village. Anything written before 2023 sends you to the old address.
- PUNCH's 2016 bar crawl dates the opening to 1994. Two later sources and the bar itself say 1993.
Verdict
should-visit — Seventeen seats make this a bar for two people, arriving early, with the rest of the night planned elsewhere.