The New York cocktail line.

Sasha Petraske opened Milk & Honey at 134 Eldridge Street in 2000 and taught the two bartenders who own the room today, so the way you order at Attaboy is the way he left it. You describe a spirit and a mood and somebody builds to it. Death & Co East Village opened on New Year's Eve 2006, handed the drinks to its bartenders, and grew a menu to book length that bars across the country copied; PUNCH credits the brown, bitter and stirred style most of this city still pours to that room. Audrey Saunders opened the third house, Pegu Club, in 2005, and the bartenders she trained went on to run rooms all over downtown. Kenta Goto did seven years there before he opened BAR GOTO a mile east and put a shut sakura flower in a martini so it opens in the glass. His room is where that schooling is still poured.

Jim Meehan hid the lab work. He opened Please Don't Tell behind a hot dog shop, fat-washed bourbon with bacon for the house old-fashioned, and then wrote The PDT Cocktail Book out of the list. Five years later Dave Arnold put the same kind of work where you could watch it, at Booker and Dax and then in the book Liquid Intelligence, and PUNCH now describes clarification, liquid nitrogen and force-carbonation as standard kit at good bars. At Bar Contra he had a back bar with no room in it and had to choose, so nitrogen and carbonation are the two that survived. Both positions are still live downtown, and there is a third one that needs no equipment at all: at Amor y Amargo the amaro shelf is the base of every drink and has been since 2011.

Bon Yagi was pouring daiginjo in an East Village basement in the early nineties, filed under words almost nobody in the room could read yet, and Sake Bar Decibel still runs off an unmarked door and a buzzer. What grew on top of it is a style the rest of the city borrows from. Masahiro Urushido runs Katana Kitten as a Tokyo izakaya at New York volume, with a martini built on junmai daiginjo sake carrying hinoki. Takuma Watanabe came off the bar program at Angel's Share and sequenced Martiny's like an omakase, warm towel first. And Shingo Gokan built the downstairs half of Sip&Guzzle as a sister to his Tokyo room. Juliette Larrouy told PUNCH that New York already had Martiny's for the Japanese style and was short of a European one, and she was opening a bar against it.

Iain Griffiths built Bar Snack around a daiquiri poured snack-sized, so the room takes the oldest examination in the trade over and over: rum, lime and sugar in the right proportions. Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy opened schmuck. in January 2025 into the gap Larrouy had named, and the same list ranked it fourth. GN Chan and Faye Chen ran a touring pop-up before they took the Allen Street address, and their Cold Pizza is tequila with cheese and burnt toast in it. Double Chicken Please debuted sixth in the world in 2022, took North America in 2023, and sits forty-first on the 2026 list. Nacho Jimenez spent twenty years behind other people's bars, and at Superbueno he aims the technique at a Mexican pantry and greets the room himself; that one sits twelfth in the world. Attaboy re-entered the same list at thirty-seventh.

Dante NYC has been a caffe on MacDougal Street since 1915, and Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson took the lease on its hundredth birthday, put the work into the drinks and had the world title four years later. McSorley's Old Ale House has been brewing for the house since 1854 and offers light or dark, arriving as two half-pints whatever you say. Rudy's Bar & Grill has poured on Ninth Avenue since 1933 on one of the first liquor licenses after Prohibition, and every drink comes with a free hot dog. International Bar is here as a PDT recommendation, and I haven't found a writer I trust on it.

I asked for the cocktail rooms, and the Arnold line is the one I follow: engineered clarity, dilution, acid and texture, with savory builds landing hardest. My own note on Bar Contra is a question, "Dave's new place?" The answer is yes. It is the room I would send a cook to first. Three more from my list belong on any night out here. My note on Seed Library reads "New Mr lyan bar. Don't miss it." Sunken Harbor Club is a Dave Arnold recommendation, one staircase above an 1892 dining room in Brooklyn. Against Blind Tiger I wrote "Best beer bar". On Katana Kitten my note is two words, "Go here.", and on Amor y Amargo it is one, "Bitters!".

I haven't found a recent review of the drinking at Death & Co, or one of Attaboy since it doubled in size, and I haven't found a review of Experimental Cocktail Club at all. The gap runs at both ends of this page.