Best Secret Bar - Best of New York 2006 - Nightlife

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Best Secret Bar

The sliding bookcase at Back Room.

(Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)

Back Room

102 Norfolk St., 212-228-5098

Bars hidden behind unmarked doors are the faux-grunge counterpart to bottle-service clubs. Back Room, which fronts as a closed toy shop—you creep down an alley to find the entrance—is really no more of a mystery than its rumored investors, Tim Robbins (who’s been tending bar) and Mark Messier, but its devotion to the concept is charming. Drinks are served in teacups to foil “the bulls” (as the police were known in thirties gangster movies), the front door has a peek-and-speak hole, and a sliding bookcase reveals a second bar.

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From the 2006 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine

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Our mission this year: to hunt down not just the best but the best values in the eating, shopping, drinking, and general-consuming universe of New York. It’s quite the process, this, requiring eating and shopping and drinking (all in the name of research), followed by heated but civil discussion, and heated but less-civil discussion, until a winner emerges in each category.