The Waitlist You Have to Walk In For
Julie Reiner's Smith Street cocktail room has been the reference point for Brooklyn drinking since 2008. The catch is the door: reservations are limited, and the waitlist only opens to people already standing in it.
A raspberry-flecked coupe lands on a dark wooden bar, foam still holding its shape, and a bartender in a vest slides it forward without ceremony. The Clover Club — the drink, in the room that took its name — is the house test. Bright, structured, gin and lemon working around the egg white, a cocktail that predates prohibition and still tastes like it was invented this year. If this one is off, the rest won't be on. It isn't off.
Julie Reiner opened the room in 2008 on the Smith Street strip that different sources file under Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, or Downtown Brooklyn depending on which map you trust. It has held a place in the World's 50 Best Bars rankings since 2009 and settled in as the Brooklyn cocktail bar other cocktail bars measure themselves against. It is a sit-down room, not a stop on a crawl. The people who treat it as the latter get the worst version of it.
The waitlist you have to physically stand in to join is the tell — this room only rewards drinkers who settle in.
Editorial Deep
The namesake is the entry point and the one to lead with — gin, raspberry, lemon, dry vermouth, egg white, a drink built in 1908 and still the sharpest thing on the list. From there, the menu splits into two useful directions. The savory-leaning cocktails do real work: the Coping Mechanism at $18 runs bell pepper-infused tequila with Cocchi Americano, fino sherry and Suze into something dry and vegetal that most bars would not attempt and most drinkers would not order. The Rising Sun at $19 pushes barley tea-infused Japanese whisky through PX sherry, Punt e Mes and CioCiaro amaro — bitter, layered, the kind of drink a bar program builds around when it wants to prove it can.
Dark wood the length of the bar, brass fittings that have dulled across eighteen years of hands and glasses, a pressed-tin ceiling that catches the light from wall sconces and drops it back down warm. Banquettes line the far wall, small marble-topped tables in front of them, and the back room opens into a fireplace lounge that runs at a lower volume than the front bar. The music sits under the conversation until about ten, when it climbs — not aggressively, but enough that a first date should book earlier rather than later.
Brooklyn thirty-somethings who read the drinks list before they order, a steady rotation of industry regulars who know the bartenders by name, and — because the bar's reputation draws them — a fair number of visiting cocktail tourists working through the New York list. The mix works. It is not a scene bar and it is not trying to be. Nobody is here to be photographed. Early evening runs adult and quiet; by eleven on a Friday the volume is up and the room feels like a bar rather than a lounge, but it never tips into the crush you get further up Smith Street on the weekends. The crowd is the ballast here, not the cost.
Cocktails run $18 to $25. The Clover Manhattan at $25 is the top of the list and justifies the premium; the Gouda is not decorative. The $18 Piña Colada is the value on the menu given what's in the glass. Nothing on the list is priced to punish you. Happy hour Monday to Friday, 4 to 6pm, runs an abbreviated cocktail list at reduced prices — the cleanest way into the program if the bill matters.
This is the best version of the Brooklyn sit-down cocktail bar, and the reason to come back is the second drink — the one you order after the namesake, when the bartender has read what you like and points you toward something off-menu. Bring the person you want to talk to for three hours. Do not bring the group that wants to be somewhere else by ten. The room punishes restlessness and rewards the people who settle in, which is exactly the trade the door policy is designed to enforce.
Order this
Drink this.
The namesake Clover Club, then the Clover Manhattan with the Gouda
“The Brooklyn cocktail bar every other Brooklyn cocktail bar measures against.”
Come for a sit-down evening, not a quick stop. Book on Resy if you can; if the slots are gone, walk in and physically add your name to the list at the bar. Lead with the namesake, follow with something the bartender picks for you, and take the back room over the front if you want to hear each other. Skip if you want a scene or a crawl — the room is built for people who want to stay put.
The Verdict
