A 1951 Neon Sign, No Reservations, and the Best Martini in Cobble Hill
Toby Cecchini's Cobble Hill bar keeps the 1951 diner bones, runs a walk-in door, and pours a $20 martini.
The neon sign at Atlantic and Henry has been on since 1951, and the booths underneath it are the same ones Ramon Montero installed when he opened the room. Emma Sullivan and Buddy ran it for fifty-plus years. Toby Cecchini and Joel Tompkins took it over in 2013, kept the sign, kept the booths, kept the diner bones, and put a cocktail program behind the bar that landed at No. 64 on North America's 50 Best Bars in 2025. Cecchini is the one credited with inventing the Cosmopolitan, which is worth knowing and worth setting down: he is not pouring one for you tonight.
What he is pouring is a martini built with Hepple Gin, Dassai 50 Junmai Daiginjo sake, Lustau Blanco Vermut, and a house bergamot-pomelo tincture, for $20. That is the drink the bar is really about, dressed in preservationist clothes. Executive Chef Kevin Garrett runs the kitchen, and the burger and the deviled eggs are why the bar seats fill by 6pm on a Wednesday. There is no Resy page. There is no Tock link. You walk in, you give your name, you wait for a booth.
The room is a preserved 1951 diner and the drinks are as sharp as anything in Manhattan, which is the trick.
Editorial Deep
The martini is the drink. Cecchini has said the top three cocktails at the bar are the martini, the martini, and the martini, and after one you understand the joke — Hepple gin does the aromatic work, Dassai 50 junmai daiginjo brings a rice-flour softness where a wetter vermouth would sit, Lustau Blanco Vermut anchors it, and a house bergamot-pomelo tincture turns the finish citric rather than herbal. It is $20, which for a martini of this construction in New York is close to the floor.
Conversation across a four-top works at a normal indoor voice until about 9pm on a weekend, at which point you lean in. The room is the original 1951 Long Island Bar & Restaurant space — art deco bones, tile floor, tin-detail ceiling, a long wooden bar down one wall, and diner booths along the other. The neon sign outside is the same one that has been switched on since Montero's day, and the light inside is low and warm from wall sconces rather than pendants.
Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill locals from 6 to 8, a Manhattan-crossover crowd after 9, and a steady trickle of cocktail-nerd pilgrims who came for Cecchini and stay for the burger. It is a neighborhood room with a national reputation and the crowd reflects both — quieter and older early, tighter and younger late, never a scene in the bad sense. The volume climbs but the energy stays civil. Nobody is hovering for your booth, but by 10pm on a Friday somebody is, which is the honest read.
The martini at $20 is the item to price against — a similarly built martini in a Manhattan hotel bar runs materially higher for a drink that is not materially better. The Boulevardier at $18 is the one line item that reads full-price for a drink you can get elsewhere at the same money; everything else on the list justifies its number.
This is the best version of a Brooklyn neighborhood cocktail bar that a serious drinker would fly in to visit, and there is not really a second one that does both jobs at this level. Come back on a Tuesday or Wednesday at 6pm, take a bar seat, order the martini and the burger, and you have the platonic version of the night. The limit is Friday after 10, when the walk-in wait outruns the room's payoff — if you are not there by 8 on a weekend, go elsewhere and come back midweek.
Order this
Drink this.
A Martini ($20), Long Island Gimlet ($18), L.I. Burger ($22), Deviled Eggs
“The best martini in Brooklyn, poured in a preserved 1951 diner. Walk in midweek by 6pm.”
The Long Island Bar is a working neighborhood room with a nationally serious cocktail program grafted onto it, and the graft has taken. Come on a Tuesday or Wednesday at 6pm, sit at the bar, order the martini and the L.I. Burger. Skip Friday after 10 unless you have arrived early enough to already have a booth — the walk-in list gets long and the door queue is where the room stops working.
The Verdict
