Walk down Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side on a Friday night and you’ll pass a small storefront with a black-and-gold marquee that reads “Lower East Side Toy Company.” The lights are on. The door looks like an old-fashioned shop entrance. You could walk by a hundred times and never think twice. That is exactly the point.

Push the door open, head down the unmarked alley behind it, climb a narrow flight of stairs, and you’ve just done what Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano did almost a hundred years ago. You’re inside The Back Room — and yes, it is the same back room.

One of Only Two Real Prohibition-Era Speakeasies Still Open in NYC

Let’s get the most important fact out of the way: nearly every “speakeasy” in New York City is a theme. They were built in the last twenty years, painted to look 1920s, and named to evoke a Prohibition that ended in 1933. They’re fun. They’re also fiction.

The Back Room is the real thing.

The room above 102 Norfolk Street operated as an illegal drinking room during actual Prohibition — known then simply as “The Back of Ratner’s,” the unmarked rear of the famous Ratner’s kosher dairy restaurant. Ratner’s opened in 1908 and relocated to Delancey Street just before Prohibition took effect in 1920. The legitimate restaurant served kosher food in the front. The back room served whiskey from teacups to a guest list that included Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and a rotating cast of vaudeville performers and Broadway actors slumming on the Lower East Side.

The room has been continuously connected to that history ever since. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Back Room is one of only two surviving speakeasies in New York that actually operated during Prohibition and still operate today. The other is Chumley’s in the West Village. Everything else with “speakeasy” in the name is, in the most loving sense, dress-up.

What It Feels Like Walking In

The entrance is unsigned by design. There’s no Back Room logo, no neon, no bouncer with a clipboard out front. You’re looking for the toy company sign. Once you spot it, you walk through a small alley — gated, easy to miss — and up a staircase that has clearly been used by a lot of people who were not supposed to be there.

The room itself is a wide, dimly lit lounge: tin ceilings, vintage chandeliers, walls hung with oil paintings and oxidized mirrors, mismatched velvet couches arranged in conversational clusters. There’s a lower bar room with a globe behind the bar where, per longstanding tradition, certain bottles used to be hidden in plain sight.

And then there is the part everyone tells their friends about: the cocktails are served in teacups. Beer comes in paper bags. This is not a costume — it is a continuation. The teacup served two purposes in 1925: it made the whiskey look like tea if a cop walked in, and it kept the customer’s hand off something obviously alcoholic in case of a raid. The Back Room has kept the gesture going for a hundred years, and it still works as a small piece of theater every time the drink lands in front of you.

Friday Night Specifically

Friday is when The Back Room comes into its full second life. The kitchen-free lounge fills with a mid-twenties to mid-thirties crowd, a DJ takes over from 9pm to close, and the playlist is — per the bar itself — an eclectic mix of dance music: rock and roll, R&B, soul, funk, disco, hip hop, and Top 40. It is not the room you visit for a quiet whiskey on a Friday. It is the room you visit when you want a hundred years of New York history with a dance floor on top of it.

The crowd, importantly, is not all in flapper costumes. The Back Room never leaned hard into the “themed speakeasy” aesthetic the way the imitators did, because it never had to. It just kept being itself. You’ll see a date night couple in a velvet booth, a friend group around a low table sharing teacups, and a clutch of people who have just figured out the side alley trick standing in the doorway, wide-eyed.

How to Visit

• Address: 102 Norfolk Street, between Delancey and Rivington, New York, NY 10002
• The trick: Look for “Lower East Side Toy Company.” Walk through the side alley. Up the stairs. You’ll know.
• Nearest subway: Delancey St / Essex St (F, J, M, Z) — about three minutes’ walk
• Hours (verified at backroomnyc.com): Sun–Mon 6pm–1am, Tue–Thu 6pm–2am, Fri–Sat 6pm–3am
• Cover: No cover charge — always free
• Age policy: 21+ Sun–Thu, 25+ Fri & Sat
• Dress code: No baseball hats, no flip flops, no tank tops on men, no real fur. Otherwise, dress like you mean it.
• Reservations: Walk-ins and reservations both accepted. On a Friday after 10pm, reservations make life easier.
• Food: None served. The Lower East Side around you has plenty.

Why This Place Matters

New York has done a remarkable job of forgetting itself. Buildings disappear, neighborhoods rebrand, and the city’s relationship with its own past tends to be sentimental rather than tactile. You can read about the Lower East Side’s Prohibition history in a thousand books. You can take a walking tour and stand on the sidewalk where Ratner’s used to be. What you almost never get to do is sit inside a room where the history actually happened, drink a real cocktail out of an actual teacup, and feel the ceiling that was over Bugsy Siegel’s head pressing down on yours.

The Back Room gives you that. Not as a museum, not as a re-creation, but as an open business that has somehow survived a century of New York churning everything around it into glass towers. The fact that it still exists — that you can walk in tonight, with no cover charge, and order a Manhattan in a teacup — is one of the small unlikely miracles of this city.

Make a Night of It

The Lower East Side at night is its own self-contained world. Before The Back Room, grab dinner at one of the neighborhood’s pillars — Russ & Daughters Cafe, Cervo’s, or any of the Delancey Street holdouts. After, walk a few blocks west and you’ll find a stretch of the city that still feels like New York belongs to New Yorkers. The streetlights are warmer. The crowds are smaller. The buildings remember what they used to be.

And one of them, behind a fake toy company sign, has been quietly serving whiskey from teacups since the year Babe Ruth hit 59 home runs.

Plan Your Visit

The Back Room (entrance via “Lower East Side Toy Company”)
102 Norfolk Street, New York, NY 10002
Hours: Sun–Mon 6pm–1am | Tue–Thu 6pm–2am | Fri–Sat 6pm–3am
No cover. 21+ Sun–Thu, 25+ Fri–Sat.
backroomnyc.com

For more after-dark NYC, see our guides to the phone-booth speakeasy that started the modern revival and the East Village dive where 1920s hot jazz plays Tuesday nights.