The Guys Behind the World's Best Cocktail Bar Just Want to Drink a Pint

The Dead Rabbit is an outlier in New York City's cocktail scene. It's way down in the Financial District, where streets intersect at odd angles, just a few blocks from Wall Street and its minions, some of whom you'll find in the bar after work. That's a few good miles from New York's alcohol-pumping cocktail heart in and around the Village neighborhoods, where bars like PDT, Employees Only, Angel's Share, and the now-closed Milk & Honey elevated the act of getting tipsy (or, given the strength of their drinks, blasted) into an art.

It's also an outlier in that it doubles as a high-end cocktail lounge and an Irish pub, a puzzling combination if there ever was one, but one that seems to be working. This year, The Dead Rabbit won "World's Best Cocktail Bar" at Tales of the Cocktail and World's Best Cocktail Menu, and just last week they took second place at the World's 50 Best Bars competition.

The Dead Rabbit's owners and operators, Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, are Irish, so authenticity isn't an issue. The pair is from Belfast, where they ran the highly acclaimed and former world's best bar the Merchant. Muldoon was the veteran who recognized in McGarry a rising talent and brought him on board at the Merchant. Expectedly, The Dead Rabbit doesn't look like some of the dives or overdone stuff you might find elsewhere in the city.

"When we first started, our cue was, a lot of it was like your grandmother's home. Executing in a way that wasn't Disneyland," McGarry tells me at a corner table on The Dead Rabbit's top floor, joined by Muldoon and Ben Schaffer, who's handled promo and social media for the bar and helped define its voice. "There's an awful lot of bars in Time Square, and they're Irish bars, and it's like, stupid Irish."

The bar is named for the Dead Rabbit gang, immortalized by Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York. They were the Irish-American 19th-century crew that brawled with the Bowery Boys and carried a rabbit impaled on a spike into battle. Their turf wasn't far from where the bar is today, and the Dead Rabbit's décor evokes that era, as do the staff's suspendered red uniforms.

In a small prewar walkup—essentially in the World Trade Center's towering setting shadow—it's a good-looking bar, full of mid-19th-century details and art from Ireland. It's tri-leveled: the first floor is dark and inviting, with giant beams running the ceiling, serving as the easy-going pub; the second is a more refined place for table-service cocktails; the third is attic-like.

"Most of the Irish pubs over here are sports bars," Muldoon said. "Twenty-five TVs, and the girls with blond hair and big boobs, that's what they have."

While the Dead Rabbit obviously puts a lot of thought into the drinking experience—the menus are graphic novels set in the original Dead Rabbit era—the drinks are the stars. I had a Gladstone, a boozy little monster that another guy at the bar warned me "tasted like it could run an airplane." It was anise-y, with a round, smooth sweetness giving way to a lingering fresh herbal taste. I learned later it had a good amount of whiskey along with some aquavit and absinthe, and I ordered another.

Most of the drinks at Dead Rabbit are reconstructions and re-imaginings of historical drinks—not just Prohibition-era stuff but things that were made as far back as the 11th century. Seventeenth-century punch bowls feature alongside Harry Potter-sounding Fizzes, Fixes, Dasies, Flips, Nogs, Bishops, and Diverse and Invalid Drinks.

The bar's first cocktail book, The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual, came out this week; it's a collection of greatest hits from the bar's early days (they're on their third menu now). In it, Ben Schaffer provides notes on each drink's provenance or historical inspiration and what McGarry, the driver behind the menu, did to make it his own.

"I think that's really important to understand," Schaffer says, "that Jack went to these original texts, and in some cases the drink that he ended up with, it's a small tweak on the historical thing updated with modern ingredients for modern palates. But in some cases, it's almost a completely different ingredients list to fulfill, where he took the concept and kind of rebuilt it from scratch [and into] how he thought the concept would be."

"You've got a chapter on possets," Schaffer says. "I had never even heard of possets until I had them here. What is that, like, 17th- 18th-century, sort of an egg nog thing but it's wine based? It's very weird stuff that you can't get anywhere."

Schaffer's notes cite historical cocktail manuals as if they were scripture, adding panache with poetry citations and newspaper clippings. "I don't think there's any book that had a note on every recipe—and that was a fucking stupid idea, really, because it took forever," Schaffer says with a laugh.

But it paid off, and you'll learn some really interesting stuff from the notes. "We talk a lot about the presidential election of 1840. Not a lot of cocktail books include that," he says. Schaffer also recounts the Horatio Alger rag-to-riches story of Muldoon and McGarry in the book's foreword, doing a bit of myth-making. For aspiring cocktail historians, he recommends David Wondrich's book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl, Jeff Berry's Potions of the Caribbean, books by Charles Baker, and David Embury's books, who, Schaffer says, goes after drinks like a lawyer.

When they opened The Dead Rabbit, they ran the place like drill sergeants. In the book, Schaffer describes how McGarry devised techniques to cut down on the time it took to light a candle. They've since relaxed a bit, perhaps feeling a bit more confident, but they're always on the lookout for an edge, to borrow some Wall Street speak.

"A famous UK bartender said years ago … 'Always use the best recipe until you see a better one,'" Muldoon says. "'And when you see a better one, use that one instead.'"

They're expanding, too. Muldoon, McGarry and Schaffer run a drinks consulting business called The Best Bar in The World, which might give you an idea as to their level of ambition. They just teamed up with Danny Meyer, the Shake Shack and NYC fine dining overlord, and opened a bar in Chicago called GreenRiver, with drinks by McGarry.

Chefs are often asked about their last meal, so I asked them about their last drinks, given that the Dead Rabbit built its reputation on a dead serious approach to cocktails.

"Pint of Guinness," McGarry said without hesitation.

"Pint of Guinness, definitely," Muldoon confirmed.