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" Published in the June/July issue Part of Our Best Bars in America of 2013 &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; &amp;quot;It is in the United States that the cocktail has reached the height of its popularity, and it is in New York that it has attained the pinnacle of its perfection.&amp;quot; So said The New York Herald 96 years ago, and so must we maintain today. Indeed, there are so many excellent cocktail bars opening in New York every year, we could fill up our pages just with them. To leave space for everyone else, we&amp;#039;ve squeezed our favorite new Gotham bars into one entry this year. That doesn&amp;#039;t mean we love them any less. (Besides, New Yorkers are used to hanging out in a crowd.) Pouring Ribbons, in a rather unlikely upstairs space in the deep East Village, is a paradise for the unashamed cocktail geek: spectacularly sophisticated, adventurous modern drinks in the classic style; rare spirits (think bottles of Chartreuse from the 1950s); excellent, informed service. Booker and Dax, also in the East Village, harnesses the power of lab science in the interest of intoxication, deploying processes such as pressure infusion, vacuum distillation, centrifuge separation, clarification (for citrus juices), and a whole arsenal of other tricks, including a spectacular fire wand for setting things on fire. Despite all that, it&amp;#039;s still a regular bar, with drinks that actually taste good, which is not always the case at the weirder reaches of mixology).  Then there&amp;#039;s the Beagle, our third East Village bar. Trim, neat, and exceptionally friendly, this well-liked establishment has a small but useful dinner menu, a reasonably priced wine list with an excellent array of sherries, and \u2014 the reason it&amp;#039;s here \u2014 unpretentious, good-humored, and highly skilled bartenders who turn out a mix of underexposed cocktails from the classic era and elegant low-key originals, such as the Haitian Divorce, a cunningly simple mix of old rum, mezcal, sherry, and bitters. Even more low-key is Tooker Alley, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, which is comfortable, restrained, and quietly eccentric. Jazz in the background, a few excellent cocktails (buried in a menu book that digresses frequently to teach you about hobo symbols and the like), and Del Pedro behind the bar. Pedro, who co-owns the place, is one of the pioneers of the cocktail revival and was mixing excellent cocktails when most of today&amp;#039;s hot mixologists were in grade school. Then there&amp;#039;s the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog, situated in a 185-year-old building at the southern tip of Manhattan. The Dead Rabbit is not low-key; it&amp;#039;s insane \u2014 so geeky and so history-obsessed that by all rights it should be an impossible, insufferable place to drink. Instead it&amp;#039;s glorious. Sure, there&amp;#039;s a wait to get into the elegant Parlor upstairs, a picture-perfect gentleman&amp;#039;s bar with bartenders who are quick-draw masters of a vast menu of delightful interpretations of 19th-century cocktails, cups, punches, juleps, sangarees, toddies, and just about every other kind of drink known to Victorian mixology. But the place you wait is the Taproom downstairs, which, though narrow and thus often crowded, is nonetheless a fine bar in its own right, a place to get a perfect pint of Guinness, a shot of one of the many rare Irish whiskeys stocked, or even a glass of punch like you get upstairs. And there are oysters. The New York Herald would have loved the place. Pouring Ribbons:225 Avenue B; 917-656-6788You&amp;#039;re having: depends on where you fall on the cocktail grid Booker and Dax 207 Second Avenue; 212-254-3500You&amp;#039;re having: a Chartruth The Beagle 162 Avenue A; 212-228-6900You&amp;#039;re having: a Haitian Divorce Tooker Alley 793 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn; 347-955-4743You&amp;#039;re having: a Hobo Julep The Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog 30 Water Street; 646-422-7906You&amp;#039;re having: a Tween Deck Cup More of the Best Bars in America 2013 &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/bars/a22806/drinking-new-york-0613/>