The Rusted Truck Out Front Tells You Everything
A longshoremen's saloon from 1890, still on the Red Hook waterfront, still cash-only, still hosting live music almost every night. Come for the room and the band, not the cocktail program.
The rusted truck parked outside — American flag on one side, pride flag on the other — is the first thing you see stepping off Conover Street, and it is a reasonably accurate summary of what waits inside. Sunny's has been on this block since 1890, when it opened as John's Bar and Restaurant and served the sailors and stevedores working the Red Hook piers. The waterfront work is gone. The bar is still here.
It has survived by not changing much. Antonio 'Sunny' Balzano — born in the apartment upstairs — ran it through the 1990s as the neighborhood's de facto living room. Hurricane Sandy nearly closed it in 2012; it reopened in 2013. In 2017 a community fundraiser saved it again. Tone Balzano Johansen, Sunny's widow, owns it outright — she bought out the family and signed the deeds in July 2017 — and runs it now. It is a dive bar with a nightly live music program and no food, and you have to work to get to it. The people who make the trip already know why.
The drinks are unfussy and the room is a museum, but the reason to cross Brooklyn is the band that starts around nine.
Editorial Deep
Overholt rye, Italian vermouth, Angostura, a Luxardo cherry — the Manhattan here is a Manhattan, poured with the confidence of a bar that has been making them since before the cocktail had a canonical recipe. The Negroni is a Negroni. The Old Fashioned is bourbon, bitters, orange twist. The Dark & Stormy uses blackstrap rum and lands closer to molasses than most versions in the city, which is the right call.
At six in the evening on a weeknight the room is nearly empty and feels like a shipping museum someone forgot to lock — memorabilia on every surface, low light, the kind of quiet that makes you notice the floorboards. At nine, once the band starts, the same room reorganizes into something denser and warmer, and by ten the front space out on Conover has become a pseudo-block party. Two different bars in the same night.
Red Hook locals who have been coming for years, musicians in from Greenpoint and Bed-Stuy for the bluegrass night, a scattering of Manhattan people who made the pilgrimage for a specific band, and older regulars who remember Sunny himself. The mix is loose and unpretentious and treats the room like communal property, which it more or less is. On music nights the energy is high without being loud in the way Williamsburg is loud. On a slow Tuesday you may be one of eight people in the building. Both are the point.
Cocktails run $12 for an Old Fashioned or Negroni, and drafts like the Threes Vliet Pilsner are $8 — dive-bar money for a bar that could reasonably charge more given the room and the music. Compare it to a Williamsburg cocktail bar of similar stature, where the same round would land materially higher and the band would be a DJ. The value is not that Sunny's is cheap; the value is that the room and the program are not priced. Cash only — the ATM is on site, but bring bills to spare yourself the fee.
This is the best version of what it is trying to be, which is a 135-year-old waterfront saloon with a band in the corner and no interest in being anything else. Come back on a bluegrass night with someone who understands why you crossed Brooklyn for it. Do not come back if you are looking for a craft cocktail, a snack, or a bar you can Google-Map your way to in under twenty minutes — none of those are on offer, and the bar is not sorry about it.
Order this
Drink this.
Manhattan (Overholt rye, Italian vermouth, Angostura, Luxardo cherry, $12) or the Dark & Stormy. Skip the bespoke request; stick to the classics list or a local draft.
“A 135-year-old Red Hook saloon that trades a craft cocktail program for a live band and a room that cannot be built. Bring cash.”
Sunny's is the best place to drink in Red Hook and one of the most complete dive bars left in New York, but only if you understand what it is. The Manhattan is well-made and the local drafts are good; the drinks are stiff rather than refined, and the bartender will politely decline your seven-ingredient request. The room is the reason, and the nightly live music is why you plan the trip rather than stumble in. Cash only, walk-in only, and the L train will not help you — order a car for the last mile. Go for the band, the crowd, and a room that has been on this block since 1890. Skip if you want a cocktail menu, food, or a bar that is easy to get to.
The Verdict
