Boozy Book Reviews: Drink Like a Local New York by Amanda Schuster

In Drink Like a Local New York former Alcohol Professor editor-in-chief, Amanda Schuster has curated an extremely compelling collection of 75 bars to visit throughout all five New York City boroughs. The selection is not a list of the “World’s Best” cocktail bars or rooftop bars or most romantic spots or an armchair journalist’s regurgitation of bars that receive the most press: in fact, it skews quite to the opposite of that.

The Bars

For the most part they are not “destination” drinking spots that one plans a trip to or a date night around, but instead the quirky neighborhood dives and sometimes historically significant pubs that you’d make a point to stop into when you find yourself in the neighborhood or transferring from one form of transit to another. Sometimes these bars serve cocktails, sometimes they serve chaos. Sometimes the reason to visit the bar is that it’s a “plain old bar” in a rapidly changing part of town.

In the Lower East Side/Chinatown/Seaport neighborhood, Schuster recommends the historic Fraunces Tavern (originally built in the seventeenth century), working-class bar Jeremy’s Ale House (that serves great fried seafood from the nearby fish market), kooky bargain bar Mr. Fong’s (where the house Michelada is made with ginger beer and sriracha sauce), kitschy dive bar 169 (originally opened in 1916 as Bucket of Blood), and surprisingly spacious Irish bar Lucky Jack’s that spans the length of a city block inside. She does not include the world-famous cocktail bar The Dead Rabbit in this list, but she does mention that Fraunces is a great place in which to wait for your seat vacancy notification nearby.

Additional Features

The description of each spot might include its history, personalities and regulars, interior design quirks, time of day to go, secretly good bathrooms, and/or its signature cocktails if any. Schuster shares neighborhood details that ground the bars in- or place them in opposition to- their outside surroundings, and she shares many of her own stories that took place inside these spots too. It’s clear she knows her bars and her city very well. (Full disclaimer: I have been out drinking with the author, and she did take me to a random neighborhood bar that I would never have noticed otherwise, and we did have a great time, and I brought home a pair of the bar’s branded sweat socks as a souvenir. Perfect experience, no notes.)

Beyond the 75 featured bars, the book also includes many “honorable mention” sidebars that include cocktail bars, hotel bars, beer halls, steakhouse bars, old school bars, and others within the same neighborhoods as the main attractions. Thus, the book includes far more than a hundred spots to visit- probably triple that, all told. It is clear that the hardest part of writing this book for the author must have been narrowing down her long list to just the most special, weird, and/or welcoming of them all.

There are also a few cocktail recipes from the bars scattered here and there throughout the book, but the real value is in guiding you to the bars so you can have that drink inside them.

It’s a book to keep in your bag or build a Google map from so that you, too, will always know “just the spot” to hit no matter where you are in NYC.