One Door, Two Bars, and a Cognac Cocktail Named Larb Gai
Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy brought their Barcelona sensibility to First Avenue. The building is split in two — reservations on one side, walk-ins on the other, and cocktails that taste like tomato salad and cheese rind.
The Larb Gai arrives peanut-forward and cognac-based, which is not a sentence most bars would let you write. It is one of the reasons the room across First Avenue has been booked out fourteen days deep since it opened.
Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy ran Two Schmucks in Barcelona until the VC firm they had taken money from pushed them out and they left, their staff following. They spent a few years running pop-ups in New York and San Francisco, then opened schmuck. on First Avenue in early 2025. The setup is unusual and it is the single most important thing to understand before showing up: one door on First Avenue leads to two entirely separate bars with two entirely different menus. The Living Room takes limited Resy reservations. The Kitchen Table, next door behind the same entry, is walk-in only. Tell the host which one you want when you check in.
The most interesting bar to open in the East Village is two bars behind one door, and half the queue does not know which.
Editorial Deep
The house move is to take a familiar flavour — a peanut sauce, a tomato salad, a melon-and-cheese plate — and rebuild it as a cocktail without losing the reference. The Larb Gai does this best. Cognac carries the peanut, and the drink lands savoury and long rather than sweet. It is the first order in the Living Room. The schmuck. Martini and the Versace Slippers are the other two you should not leave without, and Bread With Tomatoes is a highball that tastes exactly like the last bite of a good tomato salad on toast. Le Petit Fizz is a short tropical Ramos and worth ordering if you want something creamy.
At 6pm on a Tuesday the Living Room reads European — plush leather love seats, low light, a UK grime playlist that is loud enough to notice but not loud enough to shout over, and a staff that mostly is not American. It feels like a bar that got airlifted out of Poble Sec. At 10pm on a Saturday the same room is a house party, which is the design intent and the loudest single complaint about the place. If you want conversation, go early. If you want the room at its temperature, go late and accept that you will lean in to hear the person next to you.
Industry people early, a downtown crowd that skews European and creative from about 9pm, and by midnight on a weekend the room is at house-party volume with a queue outside the Kitchen Table door. Nobody is waiting on your stool the way they would at a turnover-focused cocktail bar — the staff let you settle — but the sound level does the pushing instead. This is a bar where the crowd is a feature at peak and a cost if you arrived expecting an intimate cocktail room. Come knowing which one you want.
For the level of invention this is honest pricing for NYC — a comparable drink at Double Chicken Please or Overstory runs materially more, and the gap is not justified by what is in the glass. The chocolate mousse with olive oil and sea salt is the snack that punches above its price.
This is the best version of what it is trying to be, which is a European drinking room dropped onto First Avenue with a menu that treats cocktails as food ideas. Come back on a weeknight around 7pm for the Living Room with a Resy booking, or walk in to the Kitchen Table before 6pm on a weekend and order across the menu. The reader who should skip the return trip is anyone who wants a stirred, spirit-forward night in a quiet room — Attaboy on Eldridge Street does that better. Everyone else has a new anchor for the East Village.
Order this
Drink this.
Larb Gai, Bread With Tomatoes, schmuck. Martini
“Two bars behind one door, and the most inventive cocktail programme to open in NYC last year.”
Go for the Larb Gai and the Bread With Tomatoes in the Living Room with a Resy booking, or walk in early to the Kitchen Table for Le Banane and Melon, Cheese, Pepper. Skip if you want a stirred, spirit-forward night in a quiet room — this is a house-party format with lower-ABV drinks and the room gets loud after 10pm. Sit at the Kitchen Table counter if the food matters more than the couch.
The Verdict
