A Dive Bar Sign Above a Martini
Julie Reiner's revival of the SoHo dive keeps the sign, ditches the divey drinks, and puts a Clover Club cocktail program behind a marble bar on Prince Street.
A martini arrives on a small tray with a sidecar full of what didn't fit in the coupe. It's gin, rosé vermouth, fino sherry and Amaro Santoni, and the menu tells you it clocks in at 24.85% ABV, which is not something dive bars usually feel the need to disclose. The room around it — long marble bar, host stand at the door, sidewalk seats spilling onto Prince — is not the room that closed here in 2014, and the drink in front of you is not the drink they used to serve.
The old Milady's was a Prince Street institution that ran on cheap beer and long tabs until it didn't. This one is Julie Reiner's, the operator behind Clover Club and Leyenda and the recipient of the Roku Industry Icon award at North America's 50 Best Bars 2025. She kept the sign. She replaced almost everything under it. Come for the drinks the Clover Club team is capable of, and treat the dive-bar branding as decoration.
Milady's calls itself a dive, pours a cocktail-bar martini, and earns it at the bar if not at the door.
Editorial Deep
The house martini is the move. The cheeky pour is the smaller size, the full-figured version comes with the sidecar, and the split-base of gin, rosé vermouth, fino sherry and Amaro Santoni does more work than a standard 50/50 — softer, more savory, drier on the finish than the color suggests. The sidecar is a Clover Club tell; it means the drink stays cold in the glass while you work through the reserve.
Conversation works at the bar in the afternoon and stops working around nine. The room is small, the marble is hard, and there is no acoustic softening beyond bodies — once it fills, you lean in and half-shout. Sit at the bar if you want to talk to the bartender and watch the pours; take a reserved table if you want to talk to the person across from you.
Afternoons are neighborhood — SoHo residents, people done with work early, the occasional bar-industry regular paying respects to Reiner. By ten it's downtown thirty-somethings who read about the relaunch and couples on second dates who booked a table because someone told them the martini was worth it. It's a friendlier crowd than the cocktail-temple set a few blocks east and a more serious one than the tourist spillover from West Broadway. The volume is the cost; the mix is the product.
The venue doesn't publish prices; confirm when booking.
Come back on a Tuesday at five, sit at the bar, order the full-figured martini and a dozen oysters, and you will have the best version of what this bar is trying to be — a serious cocktail program in a small room before the room gets loud. Skip the Friday-night visit unless you have a table booked; the walk-in play collapses after eight and the noise floor makes the drinks harder to notice. The reason to return is the martini and the happy-hour math. The reason not to is that the room can't hold the crowd it now draws.
Order this
Drink this.
House martini, full-figured, with the sidecar
“Julie Reiner's cocktail program hiding behind a dive-bar sign. Come for the martini before the room gets loud.”
Milady's is not the dive it inherited the name from. It's a Clover Club-caliber cocktail program in a small SoHo room with a host stand and Resy reservations, and the house martini — split-base gin, rosé vermouth, fino sherry, Amaro Santoni, served cheeky or full-figured with a sidecar — is one of the better martinis in the city right now. Go before eight, sit at the bar or grab the sidewalk in warm weather, and use happy hour if the full pour reads high. Skip a Friday-night walk-in.
The Verdict
