Want to grab drinks at a New York City bar these days? Expect long lines. Very long lines.
At the Spaniard, a popular bar and restaurant with big windows overlooking Sheridan Square in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, about 40 patrons, mostly 20-somethings from Manhattan and Brooklyn, were in line around 11 p.m. on a recent Friday.
“I’ve been here for about 30 minutes,” said Julia Levis, 24, who works as a business development associate and lives in SoHo. She was dressed in a leather jacket. “I’m thinking about leaving, but where else could we go that doesn’t have a line?”
At La Caverna, a dance club and restaurant on Rivington Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, there were more than 50 people in line on a recent Saturday. Among them was Russia Boles, 23, a publicist from the Bronx, who had been waiting for more than an hour. “They even held my place in line when I left to get pizza,” she said, referring to her line mates.
In the past month, Ms. Boles said she has also waited for over an hour to get into the Jane Hotel in the West Village, but she doesn’t mind. “It’s always been worth it, even when I’ve been freezing,” she said. “It makes me so happy to know that nightlife is coming back, and the city feels like it did prepandemic.”
New York City’s bars are back and more crowded than ever. Since indoor vaccine mandates were lifted for the city’s bars on March 4, bar and club owners have reported huge lines and a big bump in drink sales.
“It’s a surprise to us all,” said Billy Gilroy, owner of Employees Only, a popular bar on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, who added that there have been lines almost every night, including Mondays and rainy days. “And I hope it means the future, the spring and summer, will be even more insane,” he said.
Nightlife owners are delighted by the crowds, since the pandemic decimated their industry. Countless bars and clubs closed during the past two years, including at least 25 Irish bars, according to Sean Murphy, owner of MurphGuide, an online guide to New York City bars.
Mr. Murphy said it is difficult to determine exactly how many bars have closed: “Did they close specifically because of Covid or were other business factors involved? Did they reopen without us knowing about it?”
Now, some bar and club owners whose establishments survived are reporting sales increases of 20 to 30 percent in February, compared to the same period two years ago.
“It’s a total shocker,” said Abraham Merchant, who owns several bars including Ophelia Lounge near the United Nations and Treadwell Park, a sports bar with locations on the Upper East Side and in Battery Park City, which have all seen a double-digit jump in sales. “My staff and I spend a lot of time coming up with reasons why. I think the main reason is the pent-up demand.”
Others attribute the rise to New Yorkers returning after the Delta and Omicron lockdowns. “A lot of people moved away during the pandemic, but now the new crowd is moving in,” said Richie Romero, who owns Hidden Lane Bar, a cocktail lounge that opened near Union Square in Manhattan in 2019. “They are all checking out their new local bars, and that’s us. We are meeting our neighbors,” he said.
Servers are benefiting, too. Samantha Caviz began working as a host and server at Hudson Hound, an Irish bar on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, last August. It was quiet at first, but now she is swamped with patrons, especially on Saturdays. “Blizzards, rain storms, it doesn’t matter, they show up,” Ms. Caviz said. “By 6 p.m. on Saturday you can only get in once other people leave.”
There are crowds even at places you wouldn’t expect, said David Rabin, a veteran nightlife operator who recently reopened Skylark, a rooftop club in Midtown Manhattan that caters to tourists and office workers — two demographics that have not returned to prepandemic levels.
“We basically opened with three scenarios in our mind: bad, moderate and good,” Mr. Rabin said. “Because of the location we didn’t really know if anybody would come. We are definitely at good or better than good. We are very shocked and very thrilled.”
Mr. Rabin added that crowds have also returned to Jimmy, a rooftop club at the ModernHaus Hotel (formerly the James) in SoHo that doesn’t usually attract crowds until it gets warmer in late spring or summer. “If the patterns continue we will probably have the best summer we’ve ever had,” he said.
Bar patrons and clubgoers have mixed feelings about the lines. Some are frustrated by having to wait, while others see it as part of the fun. “I kind of like the lines because there is a lot of energy back,” Ms. Levis said. “But I also don’t like it because I used to be able to get into these bars I love so easily.”
Others are also wary about celebrating too early, knowing full well that a new variant could set the nightlife industry back again.
“We got a little taste of this in 2021, during that summer,” said Jim Carden, who owns several Brooklyn bars including Bell House, Union Hall and Floyd NY. “That was such a feeling of elation, and it was taken away with Omicron. That was really disheartening, but at the same time, we saw that there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and if you can weather it, it will be worth it.”
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