There's a particular kind of New York bar that feels impossible to find until you've found it: three floors of dark wood and intimate corners, a bartender who remembers your name by drink two, a crowd that includes more editors than influencers, and cocktails that taste nothing like the tired templates you've been nursing for the last decade. Martiny's, which opened in 2022 inside a 19th-century carriage house at 121 East 17th Street, is that bar. Takuma Watanabe, who spent years as the head bartender at Angel's Share, has built something that earns its place on the World's 50 Best Bars list without ever feeling like it's trying to.
The eight-course omakase-style drinks menu is the architecture here. You don't order a cocktail; you surrender to a sequence, each one arriving in Kimura crystal glassware, each one a small argument for why spirits deserve the same precision as fish. The Grand Martiny—gin, sherry, port, cognac, elderflower liqueur—tastes like someone finally figured out how to build a drink that's both classical and weird. The Caprese cocktail, built from whiskey, tomato water, grapefruit juice, and milk, sounds like a marketing stunt until the first sip, when you realize it's genuinely surprising. An Oriental Manhattan arrives next to something entirely unexpected. It's the kind of progression that makes you forget you're in Manhattan, let alone on a Thursday night in Gramercy.
The food program—which runs from wagyu tartare with XO sauce and shio kombu on milk toast to Scotch 'Japanese' Eggs (ajitama soy-marinated eggs wrapped in tsukune sausage)—feels designed by someone who understands that bar food is either an afterthought or an art form. There is no middle. Watanabe chose the latter. These aren't snacks; they're small studies in umami and texture, the kind of things you'd order again if you weren't too busy absorbing the next drink.
What makes Martiny's matter now is simpler than its rankings suggest: it proves that a bar can be excellent and unsnobby at the same time. The Thursday night crowd—designers, editors, the actual in-the-know people, not the people who think they are—returns because the energy is earned, not manufactured. The three-level space creates a buzzy, intimate atmosphere without ever tipping into nightclub chaos. It feels like a neighborhood bar that happens to serve cocktails good enough for a world list.
Book a Thursday reservation as soon as they open for the week. The crowd hits capacity well before midnight, and this is the kind of place where timing isn't just about logistics—it's about sitting down when the room still has room to breathe.