12 Best Speakeasies in New York City

The originals

Start with the room that has the strongest claim to actual Prohibition service: PDT, on St. Marks Place, isn't a survivor itself but its concept — walk through a phone booth inside Crif Dogs, pick up a handset, get buzzed in — did more than any other single bar to define what a 2000s-era speakeasy was supposed to feel like. It's still very good, still hard to get into on weekends, and the hot dog and cocktail pairing menu remains a genuinely smart idea rather than a gimmick.

Milk & Honey doesn't exist by that name anymore, but its DNA runs through half the city. Attaboy, which took over the old Milk & Honey space on Eldridge Street, kept the no-menu format: you tell the bartender what you feel like drinking and they build it. No list, no laminated card, no wrong answer as long as you're honest about what you want.

Bathtub Gin, tucked behind an unmarked door inside a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue, plays the bathtub-in-the-bar gimmick more literally than most rooms dare, and gets away with it because the drinks are serious and the exposed brick room actually feels like 1925 rather than a stage set of it.

Small rooms, big reputations

Please Don't Tell aside, the Lower East Side carries an outsized share of the city's hidden doors. Nitecap on Rivington keeps a low profile and a strong late-night pour; the East Village's Angel's Share, reached through a Japanese restaurant and a nondescript door, was quietly running a serious cocktail program years before most of the neighborhood caught up, and it still enforces a strict no-standing, small-groups-only policy that keeps the room calm.

Employees Only in the West Village disguises itself as a psychic's storefront — walk past the palm reader sign, through the curtain, into a Parisian-brasserie-styled room that runs a genuinely excellent late kitchen alongside the bar. It has been open since 2004, which by New York bar standards makes it something close to a landmark.

Uptown and the old guard

The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis on Fifth Avenue is a hotel bar rather than a hidden one, but it earns a place here because the Red Snapper served under Maxfield Parrish's mural is, by most credible accounts, the original Bloody Mary — invented there in the 1930s by a bartender named Fernand Petiot. If you're building a night that touches actual Prohibition-adjacent history, this stop belongs on it.

Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle keeps a piano trio going most nights and a cover charge that buys you the murals painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, of Madeline fame, in exchange for a year's rent in the 1940s. It's expensive and worth it once.

Brooklyn holds its own

The city's hidden-bar culture isn't confined to Manhattan. Sunny's in Red Hook is a genuine dive with live bluegrass on Saturdays and roots going back to a longshoreman's bar; it's not a speakeasy in the door-code sense but belongs on any serious list of rooms that feel like they predate the internet.

Weather Up in Prospect Heights runs a tighter, more classically composed cocktail list in a subway-tiled room that plays candlelight and quiet conversation over spectacle, which after a night of buzzers and passwords is sometimes exactly what you want.

How to actually get a table

Reservations at Please Don't Tell open at 3pm exactly, thirty days ahead, through their website, and the good slots go within minutes — set an alarm. Attaboy and Employees Only both hold a portion of seats for walk-ins, so arriving right at opening on a weeknight is your best shot without planning a month out. Everywhere on this list, a party of two moves faster than a party of six, and nobody on the Lower East Side is going to seat six people who showed up at 10:30 on a Saturday without a reservation.

Questions

Do I need a reservation for New York speakeasies?

For PDT and Please Don't Tell, yes, almost always. For Attaboy, Angel's Share and Employees Only, a small party arriving early on a weeknight can usually get seated without one.

What's the best speakeasy for a first date in New York?

Bathtub Gin or Angel's Share — both are quiet enough to talk, small enough to feel intimate, and neither runs a rowdy bachelorette-party crowd on a typical night.

Styles in this guide

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