Kaplan and DeRossi's East Village Bar That Set the Craft Cocktail Template
The bar that helped write the modern cocktail rulebook is still doing the work, still charging for it, and still worth the booking.
Push the unmarked door on East 6th Street and the temperature drops two degrees, the light drops five stops, and the room settles into the low murmur of people who came here to drink and talk, not to be seen. The bar runs the length of the right wall — dark wood, backlit bottles, stools filled by 7pm on a Tuesday. Booths sit opposite. This is the room that a generation of American cocktail bars has been trying to build ever since.
Kaplan and DeRossi opened it in early 2007 and the Naked and Famous came out of this bar shortly after. Fifteen-plus years on, Death & Co has spawned outposts, a cocktail book stack thick enough to double as a doorstop, and a template that every serious bar in the country has borrowed from. The question isn't whether it matters. The question is whether the original East Village room still justifies the trip.
The drinks are as precise as they were in 2010, the room is still the best-lit dim bar in Manhattan, and the bill still stings.
Editorial Deep
The menu ranges from light and playful to boozy and honest, and staff will happily talk you across it if you tell them where you want to land. Order the Jungle Strut — a Jungle Bird rebuilt on sotol, clairin, and watermelon instead of rum, Campari, and pineapple. It's the drink that best explains what this bar does that most bars don't: take a canonical recipe, swap the axis, and land somewhere that reads new but drinks like it was always meant to be there. The Naked and Famous, born here, is still the correct order if you want to taste why this bar mattered.
Wednesday, 10pm. Late-thirties couples in the booths, a birthday four at the far end of the bar in silk shirts and denim, two industry regulars in vests and shirtsleeves nursing spirit-forward stirs at the stools nearest the well. Nobody is under twenty-five and nobody is over fifty-five. Nobody is on their phone for longer than it takes to check a message.
The crowd here is the reason the room still works. East Village locals who've been coming since the late 2000s, cocktail-serious out-of-towners who booked a fortnight out, industry people on a night off. Nobody performing. The volume sits at conversational — you can hear your date across a booth without leaning in — and the pace is slow, because the drinks reward slow. At 10pm on a Friday the wait outside is an hour and the energy inside tightens a click, but the crowd itself never turns.
Do not walk in at the top of the menu. Stay in the core band. The wild mushroom tart adds a modest tick to the tab and is the correct call. The bar isn't cheap and doesn't pretend to be; it's priced like what it is, which is one of the rooms that set the ceiling.
Come back in February, on a Tuesday at 6:30pm, when the room is a third full and the bartender has time to walk you through three drinks off the book you'd never have ordered on your own. That's Death & Co at its best — the programme working at your pace, the room warm against the cold, the bill still real but defensible. Skip the Friday 10pm version unless you have a booking and a group who wants the theatre; the drinks are the same and the wait isn't the point.
Order this
Drink this.
Jungle Strut; the Naked and Famous if you want the origin story; wild mushroom tart to eat
“The bar that wrote the modern cocktail rulebook, still fluent in it.”
Fifteen-plus years on, the original Death & Co room still drinks at the level that made the name.
The Verdict
