• Larry Lawrence

  295 Grand St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-218-7866

  Where do you go when you’ve outgrown Last Night’s Party but you’re not quite ready to stop being cool? Hidden behind an all-but-unmarked hallway entrance, rarely crowded, and covered in beautiful barn-wood paneling, this spacious, serene lounge is a haven for Williamsburg’s gracefully aging artists and intellectuals. The owners play an unobtrusive mix of Pavement, Gorillaz, and Bowie off their iPods, and there’s a glassed-in, elevated smoking lounge out back for a quiet cigarette and a Laphroaig on the rocks. It’s a candlelit oasis where you can talk Foucault without ever being asked if he played Bowery Ballroom last week.

From the 2006 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine