The Kimura Glass Is the Point
A Gramercy carriage house, sixteen bar seats, and paper-thin Japanese glassware in the hands of a former Angel's Share bartender.
The glass arrives before you notice the drink in it. Kimura, paper-thin, weighted so oddly in the hand that you set it down twice before your first sip — which is, of course, the point of using it. Takuma Watanabe spent years behind the bar at Angel's Share doing this work with less spectacle, and Martiny's is what happens when he gets his own room and picks the crockery.
The room is an 1800s carriage house on East 17th, sixteen or so seats along the ground-floor bar, wood and brick left where it was and Japanese detailing threaded through the rest. This is a Japanese cocktail lounge in the omotenashi tradition, not a bar with a Japanese menu — the distinction shows up in the pacing, the glassware, the way the ice is treated, and the way the staff read the room. Wayne Cheng, ex-Eleven Madison and Masa, runs the snacks. The whole operation is calibrated for the person on the stool in front of it.
Martiny's is what Angel's Share graduates open when they finally get to pick the glassware and set the tempo themselves.
Editorial Deep
The Grand Martiny's is the drink to order and the drink non-martini drinkers end up ordering twice. Gin, sherry, dessert wine, Cognac, grapes — it reads busy on the menu and lands clean in the Kimura glass, sweet where it needs to be and dry where it counts. It is the house move and it earns its billing.
At seven the room is soft-lit and conversational, couples on stools reading the menu twice, staff walking guests through the clarified cocktails in low voices. By ten it is fuller, warmer, the wood absorbing the noise in a way that keeps two-person conversations two-person even when every seat is taken. This is not a bar that gets loud. The carriage-house bones — original brick, exposed timber, the ceiling low enough to hold the sound — do the work that a music policy would do elsewhere.
Weeknights skew industry and neighbourhood — bartenders on nights off, Gramercy residents who walked here, couples on second or third dates who wanted somewhere that would let them talk. Weekends bring in the bar-list pilgrims with the rankings open on their phone. The room absorbs both without tilting. You are drinking next to people who came to drink.
The minimum itself is the line item to watch — arrive knowing it applies, or the bill reads as a surprise rather than a fair exchange.
This is the best version of a Japanese cocktail bar currently operating in New York, and the night to build around it is a Tuesday or Wednesday at seven, two seats at the bar, the Grand Martiny's followed by whichever clarified cocktail the bartender points at. Book Resy three or four days out. Come back for a quiet drink with someone whose conversation you want to hear. Do not come if you want volume, a scene, or a long session — the room is sixteen seats and a minimum, not an all-night bar, and treating it as one wastes the seat.
Order this
Drink this.
Grand Martiny's, then the Melon Cream Soda or the Tea Ceremony
“Book the Kimura glass, not the Instagram shot.”
The best Japanese cocktail bar in New York right now — Watanabe's Angel's Share pedigree, Wayne Cheng's snacks, sixteen seats and paper-thin glassware. Skip it if you want volume, a scene, or a long session.
The Verdict
