Finding a good craft cocktail on the Upper West Side of Manhattan can be a challenge. But there’s a new bar in the area that checks all the boxes. If you like the classics, it serves a well-made Martini, Manhattan, Old Fashioned, and Daiquiri. If you go for modern classic cocktails, they have a Tommy’s Margarita and a Reverend Palmer, an old standby from PDT, the East Village icon. And if you like a creative twist on a classic, their house Negroni is made with gin, sorel, Campari, Aperol, and sherry.
The only problem with the place is its location, which may make it difficult to find for some barflies. No, it’s not a speakeasy with a hidden door. Rather, it’s hidden in plain sight: the Lobby Bar inside David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Readers are forgiven for being skeptical of the above account. New Yorkers and tourists alike are accustomed to getting bad drinks at Gotham’s most famous locations. It’s been that way for decades. Tourist meccas like Lincoln Center and transportation hubs like Penn Station were places where drinks went to die. At the bars there, cocktails were few in number and typically terrible; the wine and beer selections were mediocre; and everything was expensive and prepared with a bare minimum of skill.
That sorry state of affairs is no longer the case. The cocktail revolution, which over the past 20 years has changed the way almost every bar and restaurant in the city thinks about adult
