Push the back wall of the phone booth. The wall swings open. Step through.
On the other side: candlelight, taxidermy, the quiet concentration of a bar doing serious work. You’re inside Please Don’t Tell — PDT, to those in the know — one of the most celebrated cocktail bars on earth, hidden inside a hot dog shop on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, and the reason every “secret entrance bar” that opened in the last fifteen years exists.
This is where the modern speakeasy was born.
The setup is deceptively simple. Crif Dogs, the beloved East Village hot dog joint, occupies the ground floor at 113 St. Marks Place. Inside, amid the smell of hot dogs and the noise of a neighborhood institution, stands a wooden phone booth — the kind that stopped existing in public space sometime around 2002. Inside the booth is a telephone. You pick it up. A voice asks if you have a reservation. If you do, the back wall of the phone booth opens into a different world entirely.
PDT opened in May 2007, a collaboration between bartender Jim Meehan and the Crif Dogs ownership. Meehan, who had cut his teeth at Gramercy Tavern and Pegu Club, wanted to make something that felt intimate and secret — a rejection of the velvet-rope nightlife that defined early 2000s Manhattan. No guest list. No bottle service. Just craft cocktails in a room small enough to feel like being let in on something.
The room fits fewer than fifty people. There are bar stools and a handful of booths. The walls are hung with taxidermy animals wearing tiny accessories — the visual signature of PDT, equal parts winking and weird. The lighting is low enough to make everyone look interesting.
What Meehan built at PDT turned out to be an inflection point in American bar culture. The Benton’s Old-Fashioned — made with bacon-fat-washed bourbon — became one of the most talked-about cocktails of its decade. The bar won the World’s 50 Best Bars’ top global spot in 2011, and the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program in 2012. More bars would cite PDT as an influence than any other single venue in New York.
The menu changes seasonally, built around balance and innovation rather than gimmick. Bartenders here treat a cocktail with the same seriousness a chef treats a plate of food — considering acid, fat, spirit, bitters, texture, temperature. A drink at PDT costs more than a drink at your neighborhood bar. It is worth more than a drink at your neighborhood bar.
What strikes visitors, coming in for the first time fifteen-plus years after opening, is how little the ambiance has calcified. PDT doesn’t feel like a museum to its own influence. It still feels alive, particular, and — despite its worldwide reputation — genuinely intimate. The room is still too small for anyone to feel cool. That’s the point.
After you’ve had your last drink, step back through the phone booth. Crif Dogs is still there. Get a hot dog. Walk out into St. Marks Place at midnight and remember that the city is still full of rooms like this one, waiting behind the backs of phone booths and beneath subway stairs, for people who know to look.
How to Visit
Address: 113 St. Marks Place (inside Crif Dogs), East Village, Manhattan
Subway: L to 1st Ave; 6 to Astor Place
Hours: Reservations via phone from 3 p.m. daily
Phone: (212) 614-0386 — call the phone booth inside Crif Dogs
Reservations: Required — call right at 3 p.m.; walk-ins possible but rare
Cost: Cocktails $20–26; reservation is free
Insider Tip
Reservations open at 3 p.m. sharp and fill fast on weekends — call right at 3, not 3:02. And before you leave, order from Crif Dogs on your way out. The Chihuahua (wrapped in bacon, topped with avocado and sour cream) is, without debate, the best hot dog in New York City.
