McSorley's has poured ale on East 7th Street since 1854 by its own count — sawdust floors, pot-bellied stove, walls of yellowed memorabilia nobody has dared move in a century — and the menu is still two words long: light or dark.
Who would love it: anyone who wants to drink in a functioning museum of New York. Lincoln-era lore hangs over the place, the dust on the gas lamps is genuinely historic, and the house motto — 'Be Good or Be Gone' — is enforced with cheerful indifference to your opinion. Who would hate it: cocktail drinkers; there are none, and asking is a rite of passage for the staff's amusement.
The ales arrive two mugs at a time — that's the format, roughly a round per order — brewed light and dark to a house recipe and priced like a city that no longer exists. The cheese plate with raw onion and mustard is the only correct food order, eaten on principle rather than flavour.
The room admitted its first women by court order in 1970 — a date the bar treats as recent history — and the crowd today is students, tourists, hard-hats and lifers sharing communal tables under a century of dust. Weekday afternoons are the golden hours; weekend nights run shoulder to shoulder with a line down the block.
It stands for an entire category New York invented — see our New York city guide for where it sits in the city's drinking history.
