Bars & Clubs >>

• Best overpriced cheesy tourist bar
  The View Lounge at the Marriott Marquis
  The View Lounge at the Marriott Marquis, the city's only revolving restaurant, is like a cellophane-wrapped single red rose: It's a cheesy attempt at elegance, but there is still something beautiful about it. Admittedly, the lounge is packed with annoying tourists and most cocktails are $15,... More >>
• Best bar to avoid awkward silences with your blind date
  Abilene
  So, you meet on the Internet. You ask him to dinner and have a great chat about careers, family, and recent vacations. And you think to yourself, "He's pretty cool. I'd like to hang out some more." Wisely, you choose to hit up Abilene, a spacious bar where they have plenty of tables for two and... More >>
• Best place to find dudes with yellow fever
  Six Six Sick
  Man, so like, there were these chicks . . . and they were hot . . . and they were totally Asian . . . and they were . . . C'mon, people! Who the heck do you think we are? You're reading the bastion of p.c.-ology after all, The Village friggin' Voice! We're not really gonna say something as... More >>
• Best homemade infused vodka
  Mama's Bar
  It's hard to find a proper neighborhood bar in the East Village these days, as the area is being run over by yuppie joints and frat boys. But Mama's Bar, owned by the same people who run Mama's Food Shop next door, is like the bohemian Cheers, with an authentic solid-wood bar offsetting edgy art... More >>
• Best nightclub design
  The Box's
  Though the club's crowd can sometimes be as boring as those found in a typical bottle-service venue, The Box's decor out-beautifies the beautiful people. Designed by Hecho Inc. (John Kole and Phil Morgan), with input from two of the club's owners, Richard Kimmel and Simon Hammerstein, the club... More >>
• Best sparkly bar interior
  GoldBar
  The inside of GoldBar is so shiny, it's nearly blinding. Most nightlife venues take the word "nightlife" literally: They hide under cover of the night, drowning their spaces in darkness, with barely a bulb to illuminate the customers' faces. At GoldBar, designed by Robert McKinley, it's just the... More >>
• Best makeup job on a club kid
  Miranda Moondust
  Heavy eyeliner and a pale face just doesn't cut it in New York nightlife. The competition to be fierce is, well, fierce, and it only makes sense that the person with the most creative look in the city's underworld is well equipped to turn his mug into anything he wants. Miranda Moondust is a... More >>
• Best late-night $3 West Coast–style taco to eat after you've had too much to drink
  Snack Dragon
  First it was next-door to Mama's, a little shack attached to the front of a deli; then the Snack Dragon moved to its current location around the corner. The new location is a tad larger, has seating, and means that more people can eat more of the unbelievably delish tacos, made up of the... More >>
• Best Brooklyn sports bar
  Cody's Ale House Grill
  Even as the old taverns disappear in the area that realtors and new business owners (but no one else) have dubbed Bococa—Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens—as quickly as the blue-collar Italians and Irish who once lived there, Cody's Ale House Grill has endured and... More >>
• Best neighborhood bar slated for destruction by Frank Gehry
  Freddy's
  Once upon a time, architect Frank Gehry had some cred among progressives. The postmodernist's image probably began fading as his designs started repeating themselves, his style descending into cliché—all those buildings that look like they've already fallen down. But Gehry's pact... More >>
• Best stand-up/dance/ burlesque club inside a movie theater
  Rififi/Cinema Classics
  Sometimes, the infinite number of choices for where to go out in the city can be overwhelming. Do you feel like seeing stand-up? Maybe an old horror flick? What about a punk-rock dance party? Head over to Rififi/Cinema Classics seven nights a week, and you'll get all of those things—and... More >>
• Best place to watch the Buffalo Sabres
  Blue Moon Mexican Café
  Plopped on the corner of 75th and First, it doesn't look like much: a bland Mexican restaurant with a vaguely sports-themed bar. But for the past few hockey seasons, this unremarkable boîte has been anything but for Buffalo Sabres fans, who have turned the Blue Moon Mexican Café... More >>
• Best taxidermy
  Red Hook Bait & Tackle
  Technically, hunting is illegal in New York City. (Apartment hunting and husband hunting are notable exceptions.) But those who delight in the sporting life—its trophies and its paraphernalia—can disport themselves within the city limits at the Red Hook Bait & Tackle bar. Formerly an... More >>
• Best least obnoxious sports bar
  Lighthouse Tavern
  Park Slope's Lighthouse Tavern is decorated in a nautical theme—life rings, boat lanterns, little model lighthouses—perhaps to make all those yachters up from the Gowanus Canal feel at home. Well, we hope the boaty set enjoys this bar as much as the locals, who appreciate it not as... More >>
• Best gay bar for slipping ones into a dancer's G-string, old-school style
  Stonewall Inn
  Over the years, the historic Stonewall Inn—site of the 1969 Stonewall riots—has been many things: a bagel shop, a Chinese restaurant, a shoe store. In the '90s, it returned to its status as a gay bar, but as of last year that bar had been shut down. Now, the Stonewall is back in... More >>
• Best cocktail that's also a hangover cure
  Yakitori Totto
  Along with the perpetually achy neck and the increasingly dark outlook on life, part of aging is gaining the amazing ability to get hung over without even having that much fun. A glass of water and a couple of aspirin aren't going to cut it if you hit the brown stuff all night. So, for a bender... More >>
• Best happy hour for silent fatties
  Burp Castle
  If you're like me—have trouble with authority but love beer—the happy-hour deal at Burp Castle could help you get over your bitterness toward teachers and cops. When you start having too much fun, you get shushed by bartenders wearing monastic robes. I know that sounds bad, but... More >>
• Best art bar on the Lower East Side
  Verlaine
  You don't have to be a poet, accursed or otherwise, to enjoy a fine night of drinking and carrying on at Verlaine. And thank the gods (i.e., the Brothers Goncourt, le Comte de Lautremont and other dandies) for that, since funny haircuts, poor hygiene, and epic pretentiousness seem de rigueur at... More >>
• Best dog-friendly bar
  Moonshine
  Whether you tramp in with a bull mastiff, low-ride with a dachshund, or prance with a Shih Tzu, the good folks at Moonshine seem pretty open to the hound population—though this is just an assumption based on the two big, cute, and wrinkly bulldogs that this wonderful honky-tonk whiskey... More >>
• Most resoundingly splendid in-House concert food
  Warsaw
  Every opening act in Warsaw history might as well be named Why Don't You Go Eat Some Pierogis Instead? This is a valid point. In vivid contrast to the disquietude suggested by most concert-venue food (say, wan hot dogs that seem to have been transported to the venue inside a tour bus's exhaust... More >>
• Manliest beverage to imbibe while enjoying live jazz
  Brother Thelonious Belgian-Style Abbey Ale
  Sip gingerly from a namby-pamby wine glass in the front row at the Blue Note and Ahmad Jamal is liable to slap you upside the head as he launches into "I'm Old Fashioned." Instead, reach for a comically oversized bottle of Brother Thelonious Belgian-Style Abbey Ale, a dauntingly dark-colored... More >>
• Best mass hipster infiltration and subsequent exodus from Harlem
  United Palace Theatre
  Most of those intimately familiar with Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A' Train" are still unaware that the jazz classic's full title is "Take the A' Train After Seeing Modest Mouse." Harlem's United Palace Theatre is an excellent, slightly oddball, profoundly large venue, an old movie theater... More >>
• Best place to see great up-and-coming bands before they embrace their own hype
  Goodbye Blue Monday
  Hidden in plain sight among the dusty bodegas, dollar stores, halal poultry shops, and other such establishments peculiar to the crumbling Hispanic neighborhood/kosher enclave/ yuppie kennel centered along Broadway, way east in Brooklyn, is Goodbye Blue Monday. Named in homage to novelist Kurt... More >>
• Best place for gay men of a certain bent to smoke, cruise, and maybe even get their Wescos polished
  The Eagle
  Despite AIDS, changing fashions in sex and sexuality, and the West Side real-estate boom that continues to devastate area nightlife, crowds of he-men still flock to New York's sole serious butch bar, The Eagle, to drink, drug, pose, shoot pool, tease the bootblack, buy a cock ring or other... More >>
• Best place to fall out of love with a band
  Galapagos
  Fickle is the heart of a lover of pop music— "pop" being by nature an ephemeral thing, anyhow. But clubs like Galapagos don't make it any easier for devotees to carry the torch, even over the course of a typical 40-minute live club set. At a recent release party for local music rag The... More >>
• Best Brooklyn venue rebuilt to look exactly like a Manhattan venue
  Music Hall of Williamsburg
  When Bowery Presents shut down semi-beloved B-burg haunt Northsix earlier this year and announced plans to revamp and reopen it as the grandly retitled Music Hall of Williamsburg, we expected a stylish-ass upgrade—the Times announced that the result would have "balconies and a big-city... More >>
• Best Irish bartender
  Peter O'Connell
  One could argue that the greatest thing about Molly's Shebeen in Gramercy Park is its fireplace: a real wood-burning hearth, not the lame gas kind—one of the few legal wood fireplaces left in a bar in the city. And it is indeed a pleasure to step into this cozy Irish sanctuary on a... More >>
• Best bar for up-and-coming writers
  Half King Bar
  Hoards of starving freelancers regularly flock to Half King Bar in Chelsea for its Monday reading series. The bar's own literati proprietor— Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm)—has been known to captivate a standing-room-only crowd by reading his own work. However, the pub usually... More >>
• Best place to mourn the closing of Tonic, Fez, Sin-é, and other small but important live-music venues
  Hi-Fi
  Recently, I attended the 33.3 birthday party of my filmmaker pal Sonny, which he held at a generic downtown bar called Hi-Fi. In addition to his fame as filmmaker and host, Sonny is also something of a fixture on the local indie-pop scene (check out his fab documentaries about the punk-rock... More >>