Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
Hidden Gems & Odd Finds picks in New York City.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
The Lower East Side Bar Where the Drinks Are Built Like Algorithms
Double Chicken Please opened on Allen Street in November 2020 and was named the best bar in North America by 2023, ranked #2 on the World's 50 Best Bars list the same year. The back room runs a menu of named cocktails — Cold Pizza, Waldorf Salad, Thai Curry — each one a deconstructed dish reassembled as a drink. The week "ai" climbed back into Google's U.S. top-ten search trend, the most-talked-about cocktail menu in New York was already built on the same compositional logic — and had got there four years earlier.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
Six NYC Counter Rooms That Want You to Show Up Alone
Solo-counter dinner, weeknight or weekend. Six rooms across the city built for a single seat.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
After Frieze, Four Rooms Where You Can Still Hear
May 13, fair-week is loud. These four NYC rooms are not. Museums, libraries, artist-run kitchens.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Science-Lab Speakeasy Hidden in the Building Where Nikola Tesla Lived
Patent Pending is a 34-seat underground cocktail bar in the old cellar of the Radio Wave Building at 49 West 27th Street — the same building where Nikola Tesla lived and conducted his radio experiments in the late 1890s. During the day it's a coffee shop. After 5pm, the menu board swings open. Tesla famously opposed Prohibition and wrote multiple pieces defending alcohol. The bar is his kind of sequel.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Bar Inside a Former Casket Factory in Bushwick
Pine Box Rock Shop has occupied a former casket factory at 12 Grattan Street since October 2010. The building's past life shapes everything here — from the name to the rusted oil drum tables on the floor — and its three co-founders, all working musicians, understood from the start that a place this specific doesn't need much more decoration. Go on a Wednesday before 10pm, when trivia is still running in the back and the band hasn't yet made conversation impossible.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A 19th-Century Longshoreman Bar at the End of Brooklyn
Sunny's Bar on Conover Street in Red Hook has been here since 1890 — built for dockworkers, surviving by being too far out of the way to ruin. After Hurricane Sandy flooded it in 2012, the neighborhood raised the money to bring it back. Most nights it's the jukebox and a particular quality of light.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Victorian Parlor Hidden Behind a Doorbell in Chelsea
There is a brass doorbell on West 17th Street that most people walk past. They're looking for a sign, or a menu in the window, or any other signal that something is here. There is none. You ring the bell and you wait — and the decision to do so is already the whole point.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Speakeasy Hidden Behind a Hot Dog Stand on St. Mark's Place
Inside a hot dog shop on St. Mark's Place, there is a wooden phone booth, a rotary telephone, and a handset you dial by pressing "1." A wall opens. Since May 2007, PDT — Please Don't Tell — has been what happens next, and why a generation of bars decided that hiding their entrances was worth the trouble.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Hi-Fi Listening Bar Built to Sound Like the Inside of a Speaker
Eavesdrop is a 1,000-square-foot listening bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, designed from the studs out like a recording studio. Baltic birch plywood lines the ceiling, walls, and shelving — not for aesthetics, but to make the room sound right. The bartender doesn't hand you a menu. He asks what you feel like tonight. And the general understanding about keeping your voice down? The room enforces it better than any sign on the wall.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Tesla-Themed Speakeasy Behind a NoMad Coffee Counter
On West 27th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, a narrow coffee counter serves espresso until late afternoon. At 5pm, the lights drop, a host appears at the back, and a door that has gone unused all day opens into Patent Pending — a cocktail bar built inside the basement of the building where Nikola Tesla lived in the 1890s and ran his first long-distance wireless receiver on the roof. The drinks are named after his experiments. Most speakeasy façades are bits; this one happens to be the address.
- Hidden Gems & Odd Finds
A Bar with No Menu, Since 2013
Attaboy has no menu. You tell the bartender what kind of night you're having, and they build the mood into a cocktail. Here's how the system actually works, and the three drinks we talked our way into.
