The Door That Decides Who Comes In
Everything about PDT begins with the entrance — or more precisely, with the decision to hide one. Crif Dogs has occupied 113 St. Marks Place since 2001, serving deep-fried hot dogs under fluorescent light in a room that has always felt more late-night accident than destination. The wooden phone booth in the back corner has been there since the speakeasy opened alongside it in 2007. You lift the red rotary handset, dial "1," and wait. A host answers. The back wall of the booth swings inward.
This is not a gimmick stapled onto a normal bar. The entrance is structurally load-bearing. It calibrates the room before a single drink is poured — not through velvet-rope exclusivity, but by filtering for the curious over the casual. The people who find PDT once tend to come back. The people who find the process annoying rather than interesting tend not to have been the right fit anyway. It is a rough, good-natured personality test that runs every night from five o'clock.
Why a Hot Dog Shop, and Why It Worked
The original arrangement was partly a matter of logistics. Jim Meehan — a bartender who had made his name at Pegu Club and Gramercy Tavern — needed a liquor license that could legally extend into an adjacent space. Crif Dogs co-owners Brian Shebairo and Chris Antista had one, and a back room going unused. They knocked through a wall, installed a phone booth, and PDT opened on May 24, 2007.
What the logistics don't explain is the particular alchemy that followed. Meehan could have built a conventional bar with the same cocktail program and the same care. What the hot dog shop added was a kind of productive absurdity — an open acknowledgment that the whole enterprise was, at some level, a joke that happened to take craft seriously. The contrast between gourmet cocktails and fried franks was not incidental. It was the argument.
The Benton's Old-Fashioned and What It Said
PDT's most celebrated drink is the Benton's Old-Fashioned: bourbon fat-washed with cured ham drippings from Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Tennessee, then frozen to separate the fat, combined with Grade B maple syrup and Angostura bitters. In 2007, this was an unusual idea. Fat-washing spirits existed as a culinary technique; transplanting it to commercial bartending was not yet common practice.
The drink became a benchmark — cited in cocktail literature, replicated internationally, and included in Meehan's own PDT Cocktail Book, published in 2011. Whether or not the Benton's Old-Fashioned is the drink that invented modern cocktail culture is a matter for bar arguments. That PDT was the bar that made such arguments feel worth having is less contested.
A Room That Holds Roughly Four Dozen People
PDT seats about 48. There is no standing room. Reservations are strongly recommended; a walk-in attempt on a Friday or Saturday can mean several hours of waiting outside in the East Village. The room is dark — taxidermy on the walls, leather booth seating along one side, dim amber light from pendant lamps — and quiet enough that you can hear the person across from you without leaning in. Cocktails run roughly $16–20.
In 2009, Meehan took the Spirited Award for American Bartender of the Year, and PDT won World's Best Cocktail Bar. In 2011, the bar topped the World's 50 Best Bars list. In 2012, the James Beard Foundation gave it the first-ever Outstanding Bar Program award. Jeff Bell, who took over operations after Meehan moved to Portland in 2014, won the Spirited Award for Best American Bartender in 2017. In 2020, Bell purchased PDT and Crif Dogs outright from Shebairo. The bar's second location is at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong — also accessed through a phone booth.
The Grammar That Spread
By 2013, The Dead Rabbit had opened in the Financial District. By 2015, the number of bars in American cities describing themselves as speakeasy-inspired had grown difficult to count. The unmarked entrance, the coded access, the deliberate inaccessibility as a design choice — all of it traces back, in the modern American bar context, to PDT's phone booth on St. Mark's Place.
This is PDT's structural contribution, and it is distinct from its cocktail quality, which remains the actual reason to go. The bar demonstrated that concealment could function as a form of hospitality — if what was being concealed was genuinely worth the trouble. Many bars copied the concealment. Fewer bothered with the second part.
Practical notes
- Address: 113 St. Marks Place (between 1st Ave and Ave A), East Village, New York, NY 10009
- Access: Enter through Crif Dogs. The wooden phone booth is at the back. Lift the handset and dial "1." The host opens the back wall from inside.
- Hours: Sunday–Thursday 5pm–2am; Friday–Saturday 5pm–3am
- Reservations: Strongly recommended. Walk-in wait on weekends can exceed four hours.
- What to order: The Benton's Old-Fashioned. The Crif Dogs hot dog menu is available inside — it pairs better with a craft cocktail than you would expect.
- Best window: Tuesday or Wednesday evening, arriving at 5:30pm. The host picks up quickly, the room is not yet full, and the first drink costs what it should feel like.
- What to do after: Walk east on St. Marks toward Tompkins Square Park, or north to Veselka on 2nd Ave and 9th St — the Ukrainian diner runs until 4am.
The Point
Not every bar that hides its entrance deserves to. PDT hid its entrance in May 2007, topped the world's best bar rankings in 2011, earned a James Beard Award in 2012, and has been running on the same block ever since — still reservation-only, still roughly four dozen seats, still the Benton's Old-Fashioned on the menu. The phone booth was never the point. The point was always what happened after the wall opened, and what happened was good enough to make the door worth keeping.
Tags: #pdtnyc #pleasedonttelltell #speakeasynyc #craftcocktails #bentonsoldfashioned #eastvillage #stmarksplace #nycbars #hiddenbarsnyc #newyorkcity #oddedit #speakeasystyle #secretbarnyc #nycnightlife #karpofinds
Sources consulted: pdtnyc.com · en.wikipedia.org · timeout.com · theworlds50best.com · atlasobscura.com
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