📍Eavesdrop, New York City

Brooklyn Crawl: Stop 6

NYC's Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint sections are hyper-concentrated with great coffee shops, food, and bars. So when a friend visited from Los Angeles, I got the opportunity to revisit some favorites.

Stop 1: Sey Coffee
Stop 2: Win Son Bakery
Stop 3: L’industrie Pizzeria
Stop 4: TALEA Beer Co
Stop 5: Best Pizza
Stop 6: Eavesdrop

It’s about a 10-minute walk from Best Pizza to Eavesdrop. Eavesdrop was always intended to be the final destination when planning this crawl. Once we set out from Best Pizza we realized we needed to make a pitstop. We had a few beers and we weren’t sure if Eavesdrop would have room for us or if we would need to wait.

Down the street from Eavesdrop, we wandered into the first open bar we found. Fittingly, it’s named “A Bar”. This became stop 5.5 on our crawl. It’s dimly lit, outfitted in wood, and had a handful of people that I presume are regulars or hyper-locals. Punk rock music is blasting. It’s a dive, what’s not to love? We never sat down. I ordered a couple shots of Jamison and we were back on our way.

When you get to Eavesdrop, you have a couple of steps into this long space. You’re met by a host stand and a bar that runs parallel to the length of the space. The way the bottles are organized against the wall behind the bar is really beautiful. The whole space is so artistic with heavy use of differently textured wood laid out in a way to improve the acoustics.

Luckily we had no wait and were led to the back. This area is a bit more open than the main bar area with a couple of booths, more bar table space (like we got), and some other seating. The big feature is the DJ booth that faces the wall with a mirror reflecting into the space. There are records there with equipment to play them using the speakers built into the wood in the walls.

I’m encouraged by the audio quality and volume. The room is full of sound but with the way the space is designed, it doesn’t drown out our conversation. It’s not a place meant for dancing, it’s meant for conversation. From my perspective, even though I am not the kind of audiophile who comprehends how difficult this balance is to achieve, I recognize the effort it took to get here.

I had two drinks, both looked similar but they were different. The first drink is called “Commitment Martini” with Guilder’s Oolong Gin, Sakura Gin, and Blanc Vermouth. It’s spirit-forward but I couldn’t taste that over the tea and floral notes through the drink. The sip finished dry despite some mild sweetness in the center.

The second drink is called “Blanc Negroni” with an unnamed gin, unnamed aperitif, and Routin Blanc Vermouth. Most of the color, probably, comes from the aperitif which brought some light bitterness. It had a bit of muted, fruity sweetness.

At some point in the middle of the first drink, we got approached by a man from the bar area. He asked if either of us knew how to tie a bow tie. Their group was headed to a wedding and one of the guys had a bow tie but couldn’t tie it. I’ve never tied one on anyone but I know how. We were ushered over to their group.

The guy had been watching YouTube videos trying to figure it out. I fumbled through remembering how to do it. My friend gave it a shot after reading a guide online. After a couple of failures, I realized what I did wrong on my attempt, I had reversed it. My muscle memory was doing it to myself not across from me so each step had to come the other way. We finally tied his bow tie and off he went to the wedding. I don’t know his or any of their party’s names. It was a New York City moment and it’s exactly the type of moment that makes me love this city.

From coffee to cocktail, this has been a very fun crawl. I’ve done this when I visited other cities but never before in NYC (bar hopping in the East Village doesn’t count). We knew we wanted to start with coffee (Sey Coffee) and end here. The rest we had plotted on a map and decided on the fly. I plan to do it again.

📍Eavesdrop
674 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222

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