The Phone Booth in the Hot Dog Shop Still Opens
The bar that started the speakeasy trend in 2007 is still a hard reservation and still pouring the Benton's Old Fashioned that made its name. Whether it earns the effort in 2026 is a separate question.
The vintage payphone in the Crif Dogs on St. Marks is not decorative. You pick up the receiver, someone on the other end asks how many, and the wood-paneled wall folds open into a bar. That is the mechanism. It has been the mechanism since 2007, and every bar in Manhattan that hides behind a laundromat door or a bookshelf owes it a royalty.
PDT is the room that Jim Meehan built and Jeff Bell now runs — a Diageo World Class winner who came up through the place as a barback. It won the James Beard for Outstanding Bar Program in 2012 and sat at No. 1 on the World's 50 Best Bars list in 2011. The question in 2026 is whether the drink in your hand justifies the phone call, or whether the phone call is the drink.
Two decades into the speakeasy era it started, PDT is still the one that means it — and still the one worth the seven-day wait.
Editorial Deep
Order the Benton's Old Fashioned. Don Lee's fat-wash — Benton's bacon rendered into Bulleit, then frozen and strained clean — has been on the menu since 2007, and it is the drink that made the bacon-in-a-cocktail conversation a national one. It arrives with a large cube, an orange coin, maple in place of sugar, and Angostura sitting where it always sits. The smoke reads first, the sweetness settles under it, and the bourbon holds shape all the way down.
The room is small, dark, and lined with taxidermy — a bar, a banquette, and a handful of tables squeezed under a low ceiling. Lighting is candle-and-sconce warm, and the sound is conversation over a mid-volume mix rather than a DJ pushing the room. Materials are wood, leather, and old brick. It photographs well because it is designed for people forty inches away from you, not for anyone with a camera.
A mix of cocktail tourists doing the East Village pilgrimage, industry people on a shift drink, and East Village regulars who booked seven days ago because they know how it works. Nobody is dressed up; nobody is dressed down enough to look like they wandered in from Crif Dogs by accident. The crowd is friendly, curious, and slightly too aware of where it is — which is what happens to any bar that has been on a Top 10 list for fifteen years. At peak, the room is fuller than it wants to be and the wait for a second drink stretches. Before nine, it is one of the calmer bars on the block.
Attaboy on the Lower East Side runs into similar money for a comparable evening and does not feed you.
This is a first-drink bar, not a last-drink bar. Book the 6 or 7pm slot on a weeknight, have two rounds, eat a hot dog through the wall, and move on to dinner or a second bar by nine — that is the version of PDT that still works. Do not come back if what you want is a long, loose, three-hour session; the room is too small and the reservation clock is too real. Do come back if a friend from out of town has never done the phone booth. Watching someone pick up that receiver for the first time is a specific pleasure, and PDT is still the only bar in New York that owns it outright.
Order this
Drink this.
Benton's Old Fashioned and tater tots from Crif Dogs
“Go for the first drink, not the last.”
Book a 6 or 7pm Resy slot on a weeknight, order the Benton's Old Fashioned and a classic riff, add a chili dog and tots from Crif Dogs through the wall, and move on to dinner by nine. Skip if you want a long session — the room is too small and the reservation clock is too real. The phone booth still means something; the drinks still hold up; the pricing spread at the top of the menu is the only place the math wobbles.
The Verdict
