Bonus: Please Don’t Tell

NYC Hidden Bars and Restaurants-Please Don't Tell-East Vilage-Michelle Young-Laura Itzkowitz-NYC

Please Don’t Tell (or PDT as insiders know it) is one of the more memorable speakeasy-style experiences, mainly because you enter it through a vintage phone booth in a hot dog shop. For first-time visitors, this is quite astonishing. Coming in off the street, you walk four steps down into Crif Dogs, a divey little hot dog place. Just to the left is a vintage phone booth. Slide the door open, pick up the receiver of the red rotary phone, and dial 1. A hostess will answer and grant or deny you entry by opening a door on the other side. 

PDT is dimly lit and done up in the style of a 19th century tavern, with a low ceiling fashioned from diagonal wooden slats, a few black leather booths, a long copper bar, and taxidermy-adorned brick walls. If you sit at the bar, you’ll be packed in tight, but you’ll have the best vantage point to see what the bartenders are mixing up. Jim Meehan, the bar’s co-founder and partner behind the cocktail program, is a self-declared cocktail geek. He wrote the PDT Cocktail Book, edits Food & Wine magazine’s annual cocktail book, and is the Drinks Editor of Tasting Table. Under his guidance, PDT won the James Beard Foundation’s inaugural Outstanding Bar Program award in 2012.

Next, check out our 2015 guide to the Top 10 Hidden Bars in NYC.