There are bars that announce themselves with a velvet rope, and then there are bars that offer you a Martini small enough to look almost mischievous.
Bar Etienne, a new French-leaning bar and restaurant at 44 Bedford St. in the West Village, belongs to the second category. Its Teeny ’Tinis cost $14 and arrive in reduced proportions, a civilized proposition in a neighborhood where a cocktail can too easily become both a financial commitment and the evening’s dominant event. The little drinks are also a useful introduction to the place itself: polished but not grand, playful without being unserious, and interested in technique without demanding that the customer admire the machinery.
The bar is the first joint project from Michael Bray, the restaurateur behind Bar Valentina on the Lower East Side, and Keith Larry, who spent more than a decade at Employees Only. Their friendship predates the restaurant by more than 20 years. They met during Bray’s second day in New York and later became bandmates, roommates and colleagues, working at places including the Beatrice Inn and Gallow Green before pursuing separate careers in hospitality.
That history gives Bar Etienne a quality that many new restaurants spend heavily trying to manufacture: the suggestion that the room existed in somebody’s head long before a designer began ordering furniture.
A neighborhood room
The address has its own nightlife memory. Bandits occupied the space most recently, and Daddy-O lived there before that. Bar Etienne keeps the compact dimensions but changes the vocabulary. Bray worked with Cody Parks on an interior that borrows from Parisian bistros and old downtown New York bars without turning the room into a theme restaurant.
Original mahogany millwork was restored. A zinc bar top was made in Brooklyn. Vintage French furniture and a bright red banquette give the room a slightly accumulated quality. Underfoot is a pique-assiette-style mosaic assembled from broken tiles, with small images hidden in it: lips, hearts, a boot and, inevitably, a Martini glass. Large windows and limewashed walls keep the room comparatively bright during the day. At night the lighting drops and the room changes character.
The serious little drink
Larry calls the cocktails “crushers,” by which he means drinks designed to be easy to drink despite the amount of work hidden inside them. The menu uses clarification, infusion, centrifugation and carbonation, but the techniques are meant to disappear into the glass rather than become a lecture.
The Martini Tomate is the clearest expression of the idea. Vodka meets clarified tomato, Parmesan, fresh oregano and vermouth, producing a savory variation on the Martini. Coffee, Mate takes the familiar espresso-Martini template toward baklava with toasted pistachio and sesame. The Banana Question combines aged rum with clarified green banana, Bana Canne and lime.
Then there are the Teeny ’Tinis: five small-format Martinis, including classic, dirty and mushroom versions. The size feels almost countercultural at a moment when bars routinely sell cocktails as elaborate spectacles. Bar Etienne’s miniature Martini suggests another possibility: have a drink, then perhaps have another kind of drink.
The French influence becomes most literal with Pastis n’ Panisse, which pairs a one-ounce pour of pastis with a petite chickpea-flour fritter. It is less a cocktail than a tiny ritual.
Dinner, if you stay
The kitchen is substantial enough that Bar Etienne can function as a restaurant rather than merely a cocktail bar with snacks. The most instantly legible item may be the French onion grilled cheese: three cheeses, caramelized red onions and Dijon pressed into a sandwich. Larger plates include steak frites au poivre, grilled branzino with brown butter and the Etienne Burger, topped with raclette and tomato jam.
Dessert creates a particularly local alliance. Claude Bakery, the much-discussed French bakery nearby, supplies an exclusive tarte tatin as well as its chocolate cake. The arrangement makes Bar Etienne feel connected to the peculiar microeconomy of the contemporary West Village, where a bakery, wine bar and restaurant can become destinations while remaining only a few steps apart.
None of this should be confused with a restaurant review. Bar Etienne is new, and early impressions of a kitchen are necessarily provisional. The more interesting fact, for now, is the kind of place Bray and Larry are trying to build: a bar where the cocktails are technically ambitious, the food is serious enough for dinner and neither requires the evening to become an occasion.
The downtown trick
New York restaurants are forever attempting to look as if they have always been there. It is one of the city’s stranger design ambitions. The best version does not come from distressing a mirror or buying the correct antique stool. It comes from understanding what a neighborhood bar is supposed to permit.
Bar Etienne appears built around permission: to come for one small Martini, to eat a grilled cheese at the bar, to stay for steak frites, to order cake, to let the lights get lower and discover that dinner has become a night out. The room is small enough that these possibilities coexist within a few feet of one another.
And that may be the cleverest thing about the Teeny ’Tini. It is not merely a smaller drink. It leaves room for what happens next.
Bar Etienne
44 Bedford St., West Village
Walk-ins only. Current listed hours vary by day; check before visiting.
Reporting note: This story draws on public information from Bar Etienne and contemporary coverage. New York After Hours did not represent that it independently tasted the food or drinks.
