Welcome to Pop-Up City
The Current New York Cocktail Scene Has More Pop-Ups Than a Whac-a-Mole.
Hong Kong was calling, and the call was coming from Brooklyn.
Lorenzo Antinori was in town. Antinori is the founder of Bar Leone, a cocktail bar in Hong Kong which is currently ranked No. 2 on the World’s 50 Best Bars list (for those who follow such lists, and many, many do). He was staging a pop-up version of his bar at Bar Madonna, a fairly new place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is not yet on any lists at all.
I’ve never been to Hong Kong. But I had experienced Bar Leone in a way. The Dirty Martini served at Time & Tide, a massive seafood restaurant in Manhattan, is directly inspired by a drink at Bar Leone. I admire that Martini. Here was a way to try the original.
So I rvsp’d yes to the pop-up event. It was one of several such invites I receive each week. Pop-ups have been part and parcel of the international cocktail scene for 20 years now, but lately they are rampant—in New York City, at least.
On any given week, the Gotham bar scene resembles a sort of boozy UN. Bars and bartenders are in town from Europe, Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, Mexico, the West Coast, Canada. Everywhere, basically. They materialize like an oasis in whatever hot Manhattan or Brooklyn bar has agreed to host them for a night, and then vanish and move on to their next bar-world airbnb.
Pop-ups usually last between two and four hours. If you attend during that brief period you get to meet bartenders you otherwise never would, and sample drinks you otherwise could not. Depending on the quality and completeness of the event, you may experience some facsimile of what it might be like to visit that drinking destination. Not quite. Never quite. But sort of.
The Bar Leone pop-up had the house Martini. It’s actually not a Dirty Martini, per se. It’s a Martini made with specially smoked olives. So it’s more smoky than dirty. It tasted just like the one at Time & Tide. I also had a Fig Leaf Negroni and Olive Oil Sour, which I was told were two other popular drinks at the bar. And I met Antinori, who was very nice. All in all, it was a successful pop-up experience from the consumer point of view.
May’s pop-up schedule came in like a lion. It seemed there was one every day, sometimes more than one. I resolved to say yes to as many as my calendar could handle, in an effort to ascertain the current state of the yard of cocktail bar pop-ups.
On May 1, I headed to Mace in Greenwich Village, which was hosting Library by the Sea, a cocktail bar with an oddly stuffy name, given it is located in the decidedly unstuffy environs of the Cayman Islands. I associate the Cayman Islands with tax havens for the Uber-wealthy, a place where people with money go on vacation. So this was a golden opportunity to experience a bar I would likely never visit.
Library’s bar director Jim Wrigley was on hand. Wright was riding high; Library had just been named No. 30 on the annually announced tally known as North America’s 50 Best Bars. (Mace has made this list in the past, but did not this year.) The first thing I asked Wrigley was why a cocktail bar in a resort nation was named a Library. He explained that a library need not mean books. There were libraries of anything that can be curated, including spirits and cocktails.
That said, all of the cocktails on offer had a literary correlation and Wright kept bringing out old books by the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Charles H. Baker Jr. that had served as inspiration for the drinks. The theme was “Travels in Spice & Time,” which made sense, given Mace’s hyper-focus on particular spices.
My favorite drink was a renamed version of a cocktail I was told was on the original Library menu, called Mono No Aware. (It’s called I am Kira in the Cayman Islands.) Made of vodka, apple eau de vie, green apple, shisho-infused sake and sparkling water, it is a kind of Appletini posing as a highball.
This was a useful pop-up. I walked away feeling I knew more about the featured bar than I had before—something that doesn’t always happen.
Friday, May 2, was a two-pop-up day. The second stop was quite typical; Paradiso, the celebrated Barcelona bar, was making an appearance at José Andrés’ rooftop bar Nubeluz at The Ritz-Carlton New York.
The first was more unusual: an upcoming Gotham bar, Pancakes, which has not yet opened, was staging a month-long pop-up at S&P Lunch, which is not a bar, but an old school lunch counter which has never served liquor before. So it was basically a preview, not a pop-up. But owners Izzy Tulloch and Danielle De Block were calling it “A Pop-Up Called Pancakes,” a title that sounded vaguely like a heartwarming Hallmark movie. They even had t-shirts for sale. For a pop-up!
It was amusing and instructional seeing Tulloch, De Block and their team MacGyver a bar out of a lunch counter. The architecture of the two forms is quite similar, but the infrastructure is very different in terms of refrigeration and ice production. Because of the narrowness of the space, everyone in attendance was assured of some exposure to the bar staff and a clear view of their artistry. (Pouring out the Gibson from a syrup dispenser was a witty idea. See video below.)
The Paradiso pop-up represented a fairly new phenomenon in New York cocktail bar pop-ups. It was not a stand-alone event; it was part of a pop-up series.
Drink Kong, the Rome bar, had already been to Nubeluz in April. And Manhattan neighbor Dante and Handshake Speakeasy from Mexico City would arrive in June. This had been tried before; I recall experiencing multiple pop-ups at the Public Hotel in NoLiTa in the years before Covid. But lately it’s become more common.
The Portrait Bar is currently in the midst of a pop-up series (more on that later). And Dante began a series of pop-ups at its new Accademia Dante space in the Village with a visit from the legendary Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. Since then, the Camparino aperitivo bar from Milan has paid a call. (You have to have a certain level of historical pedigree to be part of this series, which is called “Legends.” The American Bar at The Savoy in London is arriving in June. I’ve been bugging Dante about bringing Harry’s Bar in Venice over, but so far without luck.)
A colleague mentioned to me recently that there is a distinct difference between a chef guest shift and a cocktail bar guest shift. Visiting chefs just make their food and put it in front of you, saying, “Here’s my dish.” Guest bars tend to bring their whole show, including uniforms, special equipment and glassware. It’s a lot of work.
Which brings us to why bars bother with pop-ups in the first place.
There were a variety of reasons for this when pop-ups first began to happen in the aughts, among them liquor brands’ desire to be more prominently participatory in the growing cocktail movement; as well as the general feeling of camaraderie among the world’s new cocktails bars.
The main reasons today are primarily about lists and awards, and people’s desire to be honored by them. And the main list is the 50 Best.
World’s 50 Best Bars was launched by Drinks International in 2009 and quickly grew into an unstoppable juggernaut of influence. At first, there was only the World’s 50 Best list, which encompassed all the planet. Now there is that list plus North America’s 50 Best Bars and Asia’s 50 Best Bars. No doubt, before we get to 2030, there will be a list for every continent save Antartica. Bars travel halfway around the world to be present at the annual announcements of these rankings.
The 50 Best lists have become the bar world’s Michelin rankings. There are scores of bars who will tell you with a straight face that their primary professional goal is to land on the 50 Best list. And one of the best ways to earn a spot is to stage pop-ups. Pop-ups raise a bar’s visibility with the public, the press and—most importantly—other bartenders and bar owners. The bar doing the pop-up benefits most, but so does the bar hosting the pop-up.
The bar director of Nubeluz told me he would like to see the bar on 50 Best, and its series of pop-ups is an intentional step in that direction.
The Paradiso event was characteristic of many pop-ups. It was three-deep at the bar and pulsated with a party atmosphere. For those who wished to study the ways and drinks of Paradiso, it was a difficult pleasure dome to crack. I had been to Paradiso in Barcelona before, so I recognized the atmosphere and activity behind the bar as representative of the bar’s personality. But if I hadn’t, I would not have been able to make heads or tails of what was going on. After a wait, we eventually laid our hands on a round of drinks, but without being able to converse seriously with the bartenders.
The following Monday, May 5, we were at the Portrait Bar, an elegant adult cocktail bar tucked inside the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I had been at Portrait just two weeks before to attend to pop-up by Alessandro Palazzi, the famous head bartender of the Dukes Bar in London.
For its pop-up series, the Portrait Bar taken the classy route. It is tapping only celebrated old-school bartenders from Europe. On this particular Monday, the star was Salvatore Calabrase, who used to work at the Dukes Bar, but now pilots two posh hotel bars of his own, the Donovan bar and Velvet. The pop-up was sponsored by an Italian brand of vodka, Altamura. That meant that Calabrese’s famous Martinis would be made with vodka that night.
This is a significant way that pop-ups can skew the true persona of a cocktail bar. If they are financed by a liquor sponsor—as they often are—the bar will be compelled to use that brand as opposed to the brand of spirit they would normally employ when working at home base.
Another new aspect of current pop-up culture is that traveling bartenders and bars will double or triple book themselves when visiting a city. Coming to town for a one-off is becoming a thing of the past.
For instance, Library by the Sea followed up its appearance at Mace with another appearance at Bar Snack in the East Village. Meanwhile, Calabrese spent his Tuesday night at Clemente Bar. I happened to be at Clemente completely by accident, having planned to experience the cocktail pairing experience at its new Studio space weeks ago. So I was able to enjoy two Calabrese pop-ups within 30 hours.
Around about this time I was unable to take advantage of a pop-up of Coqodaq, the fancy chicken nugget palace, at The Bar Room at The Modern, inside MoMA.
This is yet another new aspect of New York pop-up culture. Used to be, if there was a pop-up in town, the bar was from some far-flung place several time zones away. Nowadays, however, New York bars host pop-ups of other New York bars. The Bar Room at The Modern plans pop-ups by two other Gotham bars: Paradise Lost on June 18 and Martiny’s on Sept. 10.
This certainly cuts down on the commute. But the emphasis is more novelty—see a familiar bar in unfamiliar environs!—rather than a visit from an exotic foreign relative.
My next pop-up, the following Monday, was another anomaly: a pop-up staged in the offices of a publicist that reps the bar. The bar was Almanac, a Philadelphia cocktail bar which is beginning to get some attention. The publicist was Hanna Lee & Associates, who has represented a variety of cocktail bars in New York over the years.
Three cocktail stations were set up in the spacious penthouse space, one for highballs, one for shaken drinks, one for stirred drinks. I tried a beverage from each station and successfully received the notion that Almanac traffics in simple-yet-complex drinks, using foraged ingredients.
After the Almanac event, I took the train to the 10th anniversary party of The Up & Up, a charming basement cocktail bar on Macdougal Street in the Village. The Up & Up has hosted no pop-ups as far as I know, and has staged no pop-ups of itself in other bars in other cities. It was a relief to be in a watering hole that was just being itself, to not live in two dimensions.
Once you get on the pop-up train, it’s hard to get off. Life assumes the manic and madcap energy of an unending rent party. That can be addictive. But by mid-May, the routine of every day responsibilities beckoned and I disembarked. There were deadlines to meet and laundry and dishes to be done.
If I ever choose to answer that “all aboard!” again, I’m sure I will find that train still in service. Pop-ups aren’t going away as long as there are list ladders to climb.
As for how cocktail bar pop-ups function in their current form, I am of two minds. On the one hand, they are basically a side-effect of bar-world capitalism, a raw exhibition of bars chasing global fame and dollars. The creativity on display is in service of that.
On the other hand, if you can ignore that ruthless reality, pop-ups can be fun, even frivolous—particularly if the guest bartenders appear to be having a good time, which they usually do—and a potential source of experiential edification. Take that attitude and the road show can be viewed as being solely for your personal benefit.
Odds and Ends…
The Mix hears that Josh Harris, the co-owner of Trick Dog in San Francisco, will soon open a new venue called Quik Dog, also in San Fran. It will be high-volume focused… Booze scriber Ben Schaffer is writing a book about Julio Bermejo, the San Francisco tequila evangelist and legend, and inventor of the Tommy’s Margarita, with photos by Phil Bayly… Paul Clarke, editor of Imbibe magazine, and I discussed the Martini on the latest edition of the Imbibe Radio podcast… The in-house restaurant at the Nomad hotel in London has been renamed and reimagined. It is now called Twenty8 NoMad, an homage to the street in Manhattan where the New York Nomad hotel stood until 2020… Peter Luger, the famous Brooklyn steak house, has added a new item to their menu—something that doesn’t happen very often. And The Mix is very pleased about it. It is a housemade Bratwurst made with pork shoulder and USDA prime dry-aged trimmings, poached in Luger Lager, a beer the restaurant collaborated on with Threes Brewing, and finished in the broiler for the perfect char. It’s topped with house-made mustard and vinegar-dressed cabbage… Grand Army, in honor of the Brooklyn bar’s 10th anniversary, has introduced its latest themed menu for spring/summer 2025: the MTA. This homage to the NYC transit system features 10 new cocktails (including a frozen), two new shots (the Local, and a boozier Express version), and two new n/a beverages. Sample drink: Fare Evasion, made of mezcal, manzanilla sherry, cantaloupe, and chamomile. The subway may not always work perfectly for you, but these cocktails will… The Mix wholly recommends “Sargent and Paris,” the new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about artist John Singer Sargent’s years working in Paris in the late 19th century. The show runs through Aug. 3… The team behind the Chicago cocktail bars Three Dots and a Dash and Gus’ Sip & Dip, have introduced the first-ever Chicago Cocktail Classic, a one-night-only celebration of world-class mixology featuring renowned bars from across the globe, on Sunday, June 15, from 4–8 p.m. Confirmed participants include local favorites, from Bisous (North America’s 50 Best Bars) and Truce, to NYC’s Sip & Guzzle, Bar Snack and Angel’s Share and Washington D.C.’s Silver Lyan. Chicago has had a checkered history when it comes to staging cocktail conventions. The first such effort, The Chicago Cocktail Summit, which was launched in 2016, lasted only a few years. The second, Chicago Style, kicked off in 2018, received plenty of national publicity, but imploded after a couple years in a cloud of controversy… The annual Rochester Cocktail Revival—the longest-running American cocktail convention still under the same management—will take place June 2-8. Scheduled talent include Dale DeGroff and Eamon Rockey and the Austin bar Nickel City.
Do you think the Hallmark version of "A Pop-Up Called Pancakes" will involve a puppy named Pancakes? Will Izzy do a pop-up in a small town, only to realize her big city life was meaningless until she met Pancakes the puppy?
Can’t think of anything nice to say on the main topic so, 🤐
Going to Rochester, again, this year?