Double Chicken Please draws a steady local crowd in Lower East Side. Booking is recommended on weekends. Walk-ins are usually possible early in the evening.
Double Chicken Please is two bars folded into one address on Allen Street. The front room is a counter-service fried chicken sandwich shop that opens at 5pm and runs walk-in only. The back room — reservation-only, capped at roughly thirty seats — is the cocktail bar that landed at #2 on the World’s 50 Best Bars list in 2023 and held North America’s top spot in 2022 and 2023. GN Chan and Faye Chen, both of Attaboy lineage, opened it in 2020 with one organising idea: build cocktails that recall the flavour of a specific dish, then put the dish’s name on the menu and nothing else.
The result is the most disciplined “concept” bar in New York. Cold Pizza is a clarified milk-punch built on tomato, basil oil, mozzarella and Parmesan that genuinely reads as a slice. Japanese Cold Noodle layers sesame oil, soba-tea-washed gin, dashi and buckwheat into a drink that tastes like the cold noodle bowl it borrows from. Waldorf Salad uses apple, celery, walnut bitters and a soft acid balance — you taste the salad before you taste the alcohol. The technique behind each — fat-washing, milk-clarification, sous-vide infusions — is invisible from the table; only the result registers.
Chan and Chen run a famously tight bar. There is no chit-chat menu, no rotating-cocktail performance, no signature glassware that doubles as social media bait. The drinks list is a single laminated card with a column of food names and prices — mostly $19 to $21 — and the floor team moves through service quickly. Two drinks is the natural round; three is a long evening. Sit at the bar if you can; the four-seat counter watches every build and the bartenders explain technique without being asked twice.
The room itself is small, low-ceilinged, washed in deep red and amber neon, and intentionally not photogenic. Reservations open thirty days out on Resy and tend to clear inside the first hour. Walk-ins are turned away after about 6:30pm. For an LES cocktail evening, Double Chicken Please pairs naturally with Attaboy two blocks away — the bar where both founders cut their teeth — or with Death & Co across Houston for the full East Village to Allen Street arc. It is one of the entries in our ranking of the best cocktail bars in New York and a fixture on any short list of cocktail bars in New York that matter right now.
Wednesday and Thursday at 6pm if you want the bar at its calmest — first reservation, full team on, no waitlist pressure on the floor. Friday and Saturday are pre-booked weeks out and the back room turns reservations on a strict 90-minute clock.
Cocktail-curious diners who want a single, complete drinking experience instead of a crawl — and anyone who has read about milk-clarified cocktails and wants to taste the most disciplined version in New York. Not the room for groups larger than four.
More options nearby in our Hidden Gem Bars in New York guide. The full Cocktail Bars in New York roundup expands the picks across the city, and our New York Bar Guide covers every occasion.
What to order
- 01
Cold Pizza
- 02
Japanese Cold Noodle
- 03
Waldorf Salad
- 04
Mango Sticky Rice
