How the Upper East Side Became New York City’s Last Bastion for Craft Beer
If you haven’t spent much time on the Upper East Side, you may have your own perceptions of the neighborhood depending on your cultural touchstones tied to the storied corner of Manhattan. You imagine Blair Waldorf sipping Veuve Clicquot, Ramona Singer reaching “turtle time” through a Pinot Grigio portal, finance bros toasting each other with Macallan, or frat dudes chugging macro lagers. What you probably don’t picture is a thriving craft beer scene, but it’s there.
The selection extends from American craft to traditional European. There’s Jones Wood Foundry on 76th Street, an English pub with a touted cask program. For German beer, there’s the Heidelberg restaurant on Second Avenue and Schaller’s Stube Sausage Bar right next door. Not far from there is Cafe D’Alsace, a rare restaurant with a dedicated beer sommelier. City Swiggers is the local bottle shop and bar, on 86th Street since 2011; there’s also City Hops on 60th Street and a location of New York City chain Craft + Carry on Second Avenue. The Pony Bar holds court on First Avenue and 75th Street; Bondurants also serves up craft beer on 85th Street; the Jeffrey is a craft beer and cocktail stalwart on 60th Street; and Earl’s Beer & Cheese sits farther north on Park Avenue.
That this many beer-centric businesses settled in a neighborhood more frequently associated with Martinis and fine wine is curious on its own. Arguably more intriguing, though, is how they’ve all continued to chug along as overall craft beer interest wanes and beer bars drop like flies in other neighborhoods of New York City. The East Village and nearby Lower East Side have bid farewell to Proletariat, The Grand Delancey, Top Hops, and Good Beer, to name a few. The loss of Spuyten Duyvil hit many in Williamsburg hard in 2024; the area also saw the closures of The Well and Mug’s Alehouse. Mug’s has reopened under new owners, but it’s a “shadow of its former self,” says longtime Brew York beer blogger Chris O’Leary; similarly, mourned Midtown beer bar The Ginger Man has also recently made an utterly mid comeback.
The list goes on for neighborhoods throughout the boroughs. But while the Upper East Side is certainly not immune to the tides of changing customer preferences and the economy — R.I.P. David Copperfield’s — it has somehow remained a haven for beer bars while neighborhoods from the West Village to Greenpoint whittle their beer scenes down to just a few destinations. What is it about the Upper East Side that allows this little enclave to carry on?
Credit: David Krauss
Brewing Up a Beer Scene
The Upper East Side historically favors beer, notes City Swiggers co-owner Pamela Rice. Earlier in the 20th century, the neighborhood was the nucleus of NYC’s German population — East 86th Street was dubbed “Sauerkraut Boulevard.” There were breweries along 90th to 94th Streets, like the German-founded Hell Gate Brewery. Other beer-loving communities like Czechs and Eastern Europeans lived in the area, too, but as the Upper East Side developed with subway lines and the cost of living shot up by the 1950s, these groups dispersed to other neighborhoods. The last brewery of the area shuttered in 1966.
Beer writer Kevin Kain sees international influences as having stretched on, though, thanks to the Upper East Side’s proximity to the United Nations and a concentration of consulate general locations uptown.
“This includes the Consulate General of the Czech Republic, home to the Czech restaurant Bohemian Spirit,” Kain says. “Bohemian Spirit is great, but the prior restaurant at this location, called Hospoda, was the first place I had heard about and experienced the different Lukr pours.”
This, Kain adds, was a bit before 2011. Craft beer existed but had yet to fully explode into its current ubiquity. It was virtually absent on the Upper East Side, barring the aforementioned David Copperfield’s. The area had its German and Czech beer heritage, but its bar scene — excluding stuffier spots serving the upper crust — consisted primarily of copy-and-paste Irish pubs and sports bars. So the rising interest in craft beer signaled opportunity for many.
“Alan looked on a map and made little ‘x’es where all our competition might be,” Pamela Rice says of her husband and City Swiggers co-owner Alan Rice. “There was a hole on the Upper East Side, no store like ours.”
Like City Swiggers, The Pony Bar opened in 2011 after founder Dan McLaughlin had a similar realization. The bar’s original location had been doing brisk business in Hell’s Kitchen since 2009, selling what McLaughlin calls “a staggering amount of beer.” They had 20 draft lines and two beer engines for cask ales. This was revolutionary stuff in 2008, and really still in 2011, especially on the Upper East Side. Before City Swiggers and The Pony Bar opened, craft beer-curious Upper East Siders had to hop on the 6 train to drink from the well.
Earl’s Beer & Cheese opened in 2011, too, and three years later, the UES got Bondurants, a modern pub with a dialed-in craft beer program and 24 taps.
“I’ve personally lived and/or worked up here for 21 years, I love it here,” says Bondurants owner Caitlin Prunka. “I’d worked in a brewpub in college and enjoyed craft beer, but there weren’t a ton of places yet — we’d go to Pony Bar and City Swiggers, but there was nothing right here.”
“The Upper East Side beer scene has always felt like less of a scene to me. In other buzzy [neighborhoods], people get over it and move on. Or, it gets too expensive. [The UES] has always been a little more consistent and stable.”
“Right here” refers to the pocket surrounding Bondurants’s corner of 85th Street and Second Avenue. People tend to view the Upper East Side segmented further into micro-neighborhoods. The distinctions make sense — it’s hard to square that the 1-percenters-populated strip between Park and Fifth Avenues is the same neighborhood as the farther-east territory known as Yorkville, 79th to 96th Streets, Third Avenue to the East River. This is where that German stronghold was a century ago; today, it’s one of the most densely populated subdivisions of New York City.
Yorkville is diverse and also more affordable than the Upper East Side that gets more pop-culture airtime. It’s where recent grads move, where families settle, where people grow old. This is the kind of area where people get into their routines of visiting their same few favorite bars and restaurants within, say, a six-block radius. The Pony Bar can hold it down as the craft beer bar on First Avenue in the 70s while Bondurants taps in for Second Avenue in the 80s.
McLaughlin says as the American craft beer scene evolved in the 2010s, he saw Untappd beer tickers filling Pony Bar stools seeking out the latest and greatest. The city’s craft beer bar scene hit a sweet spot that lasted until around 2014, when the Craft NY Act legalized brewery taprooms in the state of New York, and NYC saw a flutter of taproom openings. In some Brooklyn neighborhoods, this brought on a wave of competition, spelling trouble for the local beer bars. But the Upper East Side was about as far as you could get from the city’s brewery clusters in spots like Williamsburg, Bushwick, Gowanus, and Long Island City, so bars like Pony Bar and Bondurants were able to maintain their allure.
“Probably the one brewery even remotely convenient to get to from the Upper East Side was Bronx Brewery, but there’s this mental block: ‘Oh, it’s in another borough,’” O’Leary says. Barring some more recent satellite taprooms that have opened in other parts of Manhattan, a true brewery taproom experience has always meant crossing a river for Upper East Siders, and spots like Pony Bar, O’Leary says, scratch the itch. “If you want that community experience, Pony Bar fills in, and [McLaughlin’s] been great at supporting local breweries.”
Credit: David Krauss
Craft Beer Changes, But the Upper East Side Endures
“It was 2017 when I started to see a dip in our draft sales for the first time,” McLaughlin says — that’s also the year the Hell’s Kitchen Pony Bar closed. 16-ounce cans had become the de rigueur format for craft beer, and the uptown Pony Bar began turning through kegs more slowly and bringing in packaged beer. Cask ale sales “disappeared overnight,” he adds, and he abandoned casks altogether in 2018. Simultaneously, people started ordering more liquor, and McLaughlin began switching tap lines over to draft cocktails. This was also around the time when especially dedicated beer enthusiasts were starting to trek out of town to hyped breweries.
“People really into beer were starting to go right to the source,” he says. “I’d ask guests what they’d been up to, and they’d say, ‘Oh, I was at Other Half, I waited on line for three hours and bought three cases,’ or, ‘I’m driving to Vermont next week to go to Hill Farmstead and Alchemist.’”
In 2023, McLaughlin hesitantly did what he promised himself he never would: add a non-craft beer to his lineup. But the Guinness boom was undeniable. “Within a week, it became a top-selling product.”
Upper East Siders are still frequenting their beer spots, but orders have diversified. Among a group of five friends, there might be three drinking craft beer, one drinking Guinness, and one drinking a Negroni. At Bondurants, Prunka says she hasn’t seen a substantial drop in beer, but the kinds of beer people want have changed.
“The biggest drop off we’ve seen is in higher-ABV beers,” she notes. “We still sell imperial stouts in the winter, but there’s almost no interest in triple IPAs and significantly less interest in double IPAs. … People are now looking to extend their time together, have more lower-ABV beers, and more conversations.”
The diversification of customers’ drink preferences is what’s hurt other beer bars in other neighborhoods and cities across the United States. Virtually every bar has craft beer options, as well as just about everything else, so why bother seeking out a specifically craft beer-centric destination? What the Upper East Side has that other neighborhoods don’t, though, is more of a long-term community vibe. People live there longer and if they’ve established that their favorite spot is City Swigger’s or Earl’s or Jones Wood Foundry, they’re going to keep going there. These are their places, and they just happen to serve world-class beer.
“Probably the one brewery even remotely convenient to get to from the Upper East Side was Bronx Brewery, but there’s this mental block: ‘Oh, it’s in another borough.’ If you want that community experience, Pony Bar fills in, and [McLaughlin’s] been great at supporting local breweries.”
“The Upper East Side beer scene has always felt like less of a scene to me,” Kain says. “In other buzzy [neighborhoods], people get over it and move on. Or, it gets too expensive. [The UES] has always been a little more consistent and stable.” There’s a good mix of younger people who, as Prunka points out, never knew a world where craft beer wasn’t just what you drank if you like beer, as well as older people who moved uptown during the craft beer boom, dug their heels in at their local watering holes, and still have good taste in beer. Upper East Siders aren’t trend chasers or hype seekers.
“They’re quietly enjoying some of the best and most diverse beer in the city, without putting a spotlight on it that might attract outsiders and the volatility that they might bring as consumers,” Kain reasons.
McLaughlin has been able to see firsthand the Upper East Side’s unique position as one of Manhattan’s least transient neighborhoods, as he’s also run Pony Bar and other bars in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Business was good but we never became someone’s third space,” he says of his Midtown spots. “Whereas with the Pony Bar uptown, we were able to. We have longtime regulars who saw us through the pandemic. … The community here is just so strong.”
“We have people who have been coming in since the beginning,” Pamela Rice says. “You get very close.”
“The people here use craft beer bars as their third space. We don’t have giant living rooms in NYC where people can gather. And compared to cocktail bars or wine bars, with beer, it’s lower-ABV, you can have more, stay longer. … It’s a more accessible third place.”
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