when you want, where you want.
Schmuck Is Unlike Any Other Bar in New York
Photo: Courtesy of Schmuck
A new marquee hangs in the East Village. The intersection of First Avenue and 6th Street is now home to an unmissable three-sided protrusion of vertically cascading letters that spell out an unusual name for any business: Schmuck.
Schmuck is a bar, a fact made clear by the large bouncer posted at the entrance as well as the line of people stretching down First. “How’s it looking? How are the vibes?” a passing East Villager asked the bouncer the other night. A girl who got in line behind me inquired about the wait time and quickly left when I told her we were all still waiting to put our names on the list. I went on a Wednesday and got seated at the bar within 15 minutes; on Saturday, a friend of mine was quoted two hours.
Although the name Schmuck hints at the neighborhood’s Yiddish roots, this Schmuck emigrated to New York via Barcelona, with bartenders Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy having broken off from Two Schmucks to reinvent themselves with residencies in Miami and at the Kimpton hotel’s back bar in midtown. After a year of renovations and paperwork, Schmuck finally has a space of its own, which is really more like a space and a half, thanks to a connected mini-bar next door with more casual rules for entry and its own menu of cocktails.
The bigger bar, the one you have to wait for, is dubbed the “living room.” It’s furnished with a set of vintage couches, tables, and lighting that was selected and shipped by friends in Berlin, all laid out in cozy and convivial pockets with plenty of room to move in between. Among the objects hanging on display at the clubby back zone of the room: a Pop Art matchbook, an upside-down stool, and a found phone with giant buttons, under which is written “Call your mom.” A couple sitting at a booth in front of me cuddled beneath a reproduction of Mark Stock’s The Kiss II, depicting a clown and a ballerina in passionate embrace.
Cocktails on the ten-drink menu cost $19. Some are poetic, like Bread With Tomatoes, a highball meant to evoke the last drops of a tomato salad sopped in a crust. Others are more classic, like Le Petit Fizz, a short tropical twist on the Ramos. The Schmuck martini offers, according to the menu “more olive, more lemon, more.”
I started with a Patio Pounding Pear, an ungarnished, martini-looking drink that drank rather soft thanks to a good dose of pear cordial that calibrated the tequila-based cocktail to a pleasing level of juicy sweetness. Because the drink is so wet, explained Aljaff, who was working behind my half of the bar, he decided to serve it with something to counteract that, so it comes with a couple of long shards of Parmigiano Reggiano to nibble on between sips.
The casual bar’s drinks tend to be straightforward — Melon Cheese and Pepper is a cantaloupe drink with mozzarella foam — but the drinks in the main room are harder to predict, like the Blanka, which lists whiskey, mustard vinaigrette, and pecan among its ingredients. It tastes like a green juice. The Larb Ga, inspired by Aljaff’s time living in Thailand, is Rémy Martin cognac redistilled with toasted peanut oil, coming out clear and nutty. It’s combined with a separate mint-and-cilantro distillate, toasted-rice milk syrup, and lime juice. The effect is a gentle drink that is nevertheless unmistakably larby.
The actual food menu leans French, snack-y, and stoner-ish: shrimp in harissa butter and fried puff pastry spread with tarragon-spiked zhug was like something a chef cooks late at night after the kitchen is closed. Cacio e pepe white beans, meanwhile, were gratifyingly cheesy and topped with golden bread crumbs that soaked up the extra sauce.
If this all sounds like a lot of big, competing flavors, that’s because it is, but the emphasis on technique and attention to detail helps everything — the food-inspired drinks, the snacks, even the matching bathrooms (one is all-metal with a pink toilet, the other all-pink with a metal toilet) — make sense. There may be something to the crowd control at the door, too. I never saw Aljaff or Larrouy frazzled as they threw precise streams between metal cups and guided guests through the menu. This Schmuck, at least for now, is seriously good.
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