schmuck.

Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy opened this in January 2025. North America's 50 Best Bars entered it at number four in 2026.

Why go

The bar is two rooms with two ten-drink lists. The Living Room has couches, floor cushions and a central bar. The Kitchen Table is the smaller of the two, with one long communal table.5 Aljaff and Larrouy came from Two Schmucks in Barcelona, which trades under different owners now. Larrouy told PUNCH the city already had Martiny's for the Japanese style and was missing the European one. Arashj Ghassemi, who runs the Berlin pop-up Lobb, built the food menu with them. The dish that explains it is a white bean cacio e pepe. Larrouy said beans are common in Arab cooking and cacio e pepe is a fan favorite, so they welded the two together.

Order this / avoid

Order: the Piña Colada Pickleback. Then the BBL Brie, which is tequila with lacto beets, berries, walnuts and Brie. Eat the white bean cacio e pepe with them.
Order: a martini if you want to see whether the room can do plain. It arrives with its own dropper of olive oil.7
Order: the Larb Gai, a peanut-forward cognac drink that ran $19 in early 2025, which is cheap for what this room is.8
Avoid: arriving with a large group and heading for the Living Room. The Kitchen Table is the room built to hold you.

What locals & experts say

North America's 50 Best Bars 2026, ranking it fourth and giving it the Three Cents Best New Opening Award: the Piña Colada Pickleback manages to be both nothing like and the essence of a piña colada at the same time, and arrives in two short glasses, one of coconut fat-washed whisky and another of homemade pickled pineapple brine.1
Juliette Larrouy to Talia Baiocchi at PUNCH (6 November 2024), on how the drinks are built: I take the flavor once and I add alcohol at the end.2
Moe Aljaff to Eater NY (29 January 2025), on the Living Room list: the drinks are interpretations of moments, and the Bread With Tomatoes comes from the moment when, at the end of a tomato salad, when you have a little bit of bread and you dip it into the tomato water.3
Will Hartman, reviewing it for The Infatuation in February 2025, on what the room actually is: it is more of a relaxed living room than a European party destination.8
The Infatuation, placing it against the rest of the city's cocktail rooms: Many of New York's best cocktail bars are either dark and moody or dark and clubby. Refreshingly, Schmuck is neither.7
Morgan Carter put it fifth on Time Out New York's 2026 city ranking on 9 January 2026, a year after the magazine made it its best cocktail bar of 2025.6

Good to know

Timing: evenings and late.
Booking: book it. Will Hartman's advice is a reservation, or a queue half an hour before the doors.8
The address: 97 First Avenue, on the corner of East Sixth Street.
The company it keeps: the same 2026 North American ranking put Bar Snack third and Sip & Guzzle first, so this is a good block of the East Village to drink through in one night.4

Verdict

must-visit — Get there early. Have two drinks, then let a bartender build the third.

schmuck..