NYCs hottest new bars are really underground

Bank on it

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Beneath the starkly lit lobby of the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown, a former bank vault now serves as the dining space for a steakhouse and cocktail bar.

Butcher & Banker is the latest use for the basement of the hotel, which was part of a branch of the former Manufacturers Trust Company until 1980 and used for clients’ safety-deposit boxes, locked away behind a 28-inch-thick vault door. Before the steakhouse opened in November, the dusty vault was mostly used for storage for the hotel and was largely inaccessible.

The restaurant’s design team used what they found in the storage area to outfit the space: grand crystal chandeliers and old safety deposit boxes — the drawers were cut out to give the restaurant more space, but the drawers’ antique-looking faces now cover a wall. They also kept the original terrazzo flooring. “To cover over the floor would be, as my late grandmother would have said, a sin,” says the restaurant’s consultant, Michael Whiteman of Baum + Whiteman.

Open daily from 4:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. 481 Eighth Ave.; ButcherandBankerNYC.com, 212-268-8455

Time to pipe up

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Old customers still call Phil Columbo to ask if they can get replacement parts for plumbing fixtures they bought from the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation decades ago.

“I tell them, ‘Absolutely not, but can I book you a room?’” says Columbo, the managing director of the Bryant Park Hotel and its subterranean Moroccan-themed bar, Célon.

It’s a classy about-face from its original life as a ’20s-era showroom for the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company’s bathroom plumbing fixtures. Now, the lounge serves Middle-Eastern breads and spreads and custom cocktails, such as its highly Instagrammable $100 martini, served with edible gold leaf and black charcoal — an homage to the hotel’s striking black-and-gold exterior.

In November, the space, previously occupied by the hotel’s Cellar Bar, was restored with its original arched ceilings. The new iteration is a chic lounge with Mediterranean vibes, complete with Marrakesh-style pendant lights, pillows and vintage rugs.

Open Monday, 5 p.m. to midnight; Tuesday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.; Saturday 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. 40 W. 40th St.; CelonLounge.com, 212-642-2257

Working on the railroad

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After a night of beer-drinking at their Brooklyn Heights French restaurant Chez Moi, friends Ali Mardassi and Tarek Debira got to wondering what was really behind the wall of the restaurant’s basement, which they were using for storage.

They found out through brute force.

“They literally took a sledgehammer to the wall,” says Patricia Ageheim, who co-owns Chez Moi with Debira (her husband), and Mardassi (the couple’s best friend).

Behind the wall, the two discovered that rumors they’d heard from previous residents of the building, from when it had apartments, were true: There was a small, stone-lined room and adjacent vaulted room. They had uncovered part of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, an abandoned Long Island Rail Road tunnel built in the mid-1800s. There were still coal stains on the stone wall the Chez Moi team unearthed.

Ageheim, a native of Stockholm, and Debira and Mardassi, both originally from Paris, began the two-year-long process of renovating the space into the speakeasy-like boîte, Boudoir, located below Chez Moi. They were inspired by Marie Antoinette, who had a secret private chamber in the palace of Versailles. Boudoir opened in 2016, decorated with sultry red furnishings and walls punctuated with candle sconces that Debira tracked down from European castles.

Now, the bar serves lavish cocktails with French spirits, such as Pommeau de Normandie — a main ingredient in bar director Franky Marshall’s seasonal bourbon-based cocktails. The bar also offers live performances of world jazz on Monday nights, as well as DJ-curated beats on Fridays and Saturdays. Patrons sitting in the rear room can look up to see the original manhole cover that once allowed coal to be dropped down from the street into the tunnel for the trains. And don’t miss the vintage vaulted ceilings of the bar’s bathrooms — they’re fit for a queen.

Open Sunday through Wednesday, 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. and Thursday through Saturday, 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. 135 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn Heights; BoudoirBK.com, 347-227-8337.

Read all about it

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Before Life magazine entered its golden years as a serious, photo-heavy periodical, it had a lighter era at the turn of the 20th century through the 1930s as an illustration-heavy humor publication. The magazine was housed in a 10-story gilded beaux-arts-style building in NoMad, where employees worked, lived — and drank, apparently.

When finishing up the conversion of the building into the boutique Life Hotel last year, owners unearthed a secret drinking den in the basement boiler room, complete with a decrepit wooden bar and Prohibition-era liquor bottles.

“What we assumed, putting the pieces together, was that the Life magazine staffers were down there in this unofficial speakeasy,” says Erin Pepper, vice president of brand and experience at the hotel.

They took their findings as inspiration for Gibson + Luce, a new bar beneath the Life Hotel. It’s named after two men who may have been among the basement’s most famous drinkers: The magazine’s longtime illustrator and one-time owner, Charles Dana Gibson, and Henry Luce, the Time Inc. publisher who bought the struggling magazine in 1936.

The low-ceilinged space, accessible via a hidden staircase that wraps around the hotel’s elevator, features wood found in the basement to form paneling on the wall. Drinks have a speakeasy theme: The “Black Chicken” ($36 for two) is a potent concoction named after a rumored Prohibition code word for wine.

Open Sunday through Tuesday, 5-10 p.m.; Wednesday through Saturday, 5-11 p.m. 19 W. 31st St.; LifeHotel.com, 212-615-9910

Say cheese

Tunnels built in the 1850s to make beer are now breathing pungent new life into something equally delicious: 28,000 pounds of cheese.

The Crown Finish Caves opened in 2014 in what used to be pre-refrigeration tunnels of the old Nassau Brewing Company in Crown Heights. The three 70-foot-long caverns offered a chilly temperature for the lager, which fermented in open barrels in the Brooklyn caves. The brewery closed in 1914, and was used as storage by H.J. Heinz Company and later a moving company, until owners Susan Boyle and Benton Brown took it over in the early aughts.

Now, one of the three caverns is used to treat and age cheese sent from makers as far as Italy and sold in New York City, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, Chicago and Nashville, Tenn. The CFC team often experiments on the fromage aging in their facility, using beer and cider washes from nearby breweries and different salt brines to treat the cheese.

And while the cheese caves aren’t open to the public, Crown recently started hosting bimonthly folk-music events in one of the original beer tunnels. For each show, a different chef and brewery team up, serving food, drink — and, of course, cheese. Tickets ($20) sell out fast after they’re announced on the Caves’ Instagram, @crownfinishcaves.

925 Bergen St #101, Crown Heights; CrownFinishCaves.com, 718-857-2717

From togs to tunes

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It took restaurateur Mark Fox and his team weeks to remove layers of flooring piled onto the original concrete slab of his new subterranean cocktail piano bar, Bo Peep, which opens Tuesday.

“I knew if I went digging, I would find something,” says Fox of the bar’s floor.

He also discovered an intriguing history behind the 800-square-foot space, which housed a Garment District dressing room until 43 years ago, then remained as a storage area until recently. Fox imagines the dressing room was a cozy, special place, where customers would visit “perhaps for a second fitting of a suit,” he says.

Above the bar, Fox’s new restaurant the Rag Trader, also opening Tuesday, fills the first floor and mezzanine previously occupied by a Garment District factory (for decades, it was home to a children’s clothing company called Bo Peep). Now, it’s lined with midcentury chesterfield sofas and decorated with old dress advertisements and vintage hat boxes.

After Bo Peep opens, new traditions will take the place of its old Garment District life. A pianist will pound out new and old tunes while customers sip on 37 classic and custom cocktails, enjoy light bites and pizza and sit among vintage decor.

“This building has such an amazing story, so we wanted to incorporate it into our design,” Fox says. “The underground landscape of the city gets covered up all too often.”

Opening Jan. 9 at 70 W. 36th St.

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