The Crosby Bar
79 Crosby St., nr. Prince St.; 212-226-6400
Soho is filled with amazing restaurants, but it doesn’t have a great bar,” says Craig Markham, spokesman for the new Crosby Street Hotel. Fans of Fanelli’s and Pegu Club might beg to differ, but there’s always room for another watering hole, this one running the entire width of the hotel’s ground floor, from Crosby Street to a garden-fronted entrance on Lafayette. The Crosby Bar makes no distinction between bar and restaurant (or restaurant and room-service menus), which means you can eat or drink anywhere in the high-ceilinged space, at any hour of day, from a gluten-free breakfast of organic barley with stone-fruit compote to a proper English tea. Marshall Altier’s cocktail list is intoxicatingly broad, with drinks that pay tribute to mixologists dead and alive, utilizing such esoteric ingredients as baked-apple bitters, coffee tincture, and hibiscus foam.
The Breslin Bar & Dining Room
20 W. 29th St., nr. Broadway; 212-679-2222
This eagerly anticipated collaboration between Ace Hotel and the Spotted Pig’s April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman will likely open in stages, so be on the lookout. There is talk of launching breakfast first, perhaps as soon as next week but possibly not until the 19th, when early birds might find pumpkin pancakes with pecan butter and chili, poached eggs with curried lentils and yogurt, and the national treasure known as the Full English Breakfast (pictured). Lunch holds the promise of five terrines, tongue sandwiches, and lamb burgers, and dinner will feature pork belly for two, fried rabbit, and what might be New York’s very first scrumpet (deep-fried lamb breast). Like its porcine progenitor, the Breslin has plenty of bar seats and a no-reservations policy.
Henry Public
329 Henry St., nr. Pacific St., Cobble Hill 718-852-8630
According to Matt Dawson, a partner at Henry Public, set to open this weekend, all stylishly antiqued bars that attempt to evoke a bygone era needn’t be thought of as speakeasies. His, for instance, is a saloon, and one that will serve cocktails made with Kold-Draft ice cubes along with grass-fed “hamburger sandwiches,” oysters, turkey-leg sandwiches, marrow bones, and eventually brunch. Not only that, Henry Public, says Dawson, is “a nod to the history of this part of Brooklyn—Whitman’s Brooklyn—and the amazing people, ideas, and movements of the late-nineteenth century.” Which is not to say that Walt Whitman himself— a notorious teetotaler and thus an unusual inspiration for a saloon—wouldn’t feel at home at the zinc-topped walnut bar. He could just order an egg cream.