Enter Through the General Store on Avenue A or Wait Outside
Sother Teague's East Village amaro bar is fifteen years into being the best bitter-and-stirred room in the city. The trick is finding the door and getting in before the seats go.
The room smells like orange peel and something older — root, bark, a bitterness that has been sitting in glass for a decade. Behind the bar, bottles run wall to wall in the color palette of a chemist's shelf: umber, rust, rhubarb red, quinine yellow. There are no shakers going. There are no egg whites being ripped. Someone is stirring a spirit-forward drink with a bar spoon and the loudest sound in the room is ice on a mixing glass.
This is Amor y Amargo, Sother Teague's amari and bitters bar, on East 6th Street since 2011 and reopened at its original East Village address on January 10, 2025 after a stretch away. Teague — Wine Enthusiast's Mixologist of the Year in 2017, host of The Speakeasy — has built the entire program around bitter Italian liqueurs, spirit-forward stirred drinks, and the sort of bartender conversation where you name three flavors and something arrives that you didn't know how to order. In 2022 and 2024 North America's 50 Best Bars slotted it at #23. It is a serious room in a very small footprint.
The best bitter-and-stirred bar in New York is also the one most likely to be full before you find the door.
Editorial Deep
The Long Game is the drink to lead with — amaro, kina l'aéro d'or, Spanish vermouth, dry vermouth, and a fig-and-poppies bitter — and it lands as a low, quiet, rolling drink that reads sweeter for the first sip and turns properly bitter by the third. It is the house move in miniature: fortified wines and a bitter spine, stirred, no citrus theatrics. James Run Free pushes harder — amargo, tremontis mirto, squash amaro, rye, and bitters — and reads as a full amaro Manhattan for a room that thinks the Manhattan is a bit shy on the finish.
The address on 6th Street is the wrong door most nights. You enter through the General Store on Avenue A — 95 Avenue A, around the corner — which trades in bitters, barware and cocktail books during the day and functions as the vestibule to the bar in the evening. Nothing outside signals what is behind it. First-timers walk past the store twice.
The room reads as East Village industry and East Village regulars — bartenders on nights off, sommeliers, amaro obsessives, a scattering of dates that were sent here by someone who knew what they were doing. It is not a scene bar and it is not a tourist bar, though the 2022 50 Best listing has thickened the early-evening crowd. The energy is calibrated to spirit-forward drinking: quieter than Dante, more serious than Death & Co at nine, closer in temperament to a good Italian bar at aperitivo hour. The cost of that crowd is that anyone waiting for a stool is standing very close to the person on it.
The Long Game is defensible on its own terms — five ingredients, two of them fortified wines poured with real measure, one of them a house bitter — and reads as fair against any stirred drink of comparable ambition in the neighborhood. The pour justifies the price. The stool does not always help it.
This is the best version of a bitter-and-stirred bar in the city, and the night to build around it is a Sunday or Monday at five, walking in as the door opens with one other person and taking the two seats at the bar for ninety minutes of two drinks and a conversation with whoever is pouring. Come Friday at nine and it is a different bar — full, standing, loud enough that the recommendation has to be shouted. The room does not scale. Skip it if you want a booth and a group of six; return for it if you want one seat, one bartender, and something bitter you have not tasted before.
Order this
Drink this.
Long Game, or tell the bartender three flavors and let them build
“The city's best bitter-and-stirred bar, entered through a shop most people walk past.”
Sother Teague's amaro program is the deepest in New York and the room is calibrated exactly to it — spirit-forward, stirred, no citrus theatrics, no shakers. Go early on a Sunday or Monday for a seat at the bar and the bartender's recommendation. Skip it if you want a booth or a group night; the footprint does not scale and the price does not reward standing.
The Verdict
