At This Brooklyn Bar, It’s Just You, Your Date and the Barman

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/dining/drinks/threesome-tollbooth-brooklyn-bar.html

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Public drinking in New York can be a chore. Many of the city’s bars are about as intimate as a rush-hour subway. Others serve as the stalking grounds for happy-hour predators. When the suits and ties arrive, it can be hard to find a stool or to get your glass refilled.

But last week, on a wide industrial avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a new bar opened catering to patrons who prefer to take their cocktails in extreme seclusion. About as wide as the average human arm span, it sits inside the supply closet of a shuttered Italian restaurant. Capacity is limited to three: the bartender, you and your date.

“You own the space,” said the artist N.D. Austin who opened the tiny tavern, the Threesome Tollbooth, on Friday night after a shakedown run of several months. “It changes every time according to who comes and what they bring,” he said, referring to the guests’ sense of adventure. “After all, you’re the only one there.”

Even though the appetite for exclusive little bars seems to have diminished in New York and other cities over the last few years, there may be some who will still refer to the Tollbooth as a speakeasy. While it is true that a certain amount of secrecy attends to getting into it — there is no visible signage, and before going public in this article, little publicity aside from its cryptic website — Mr. Austin avoids the term. After all, unlike the speakeasies of Prohibition, his new enterprise is legal.

Adherence to the law has rarely been a priority for him before; most of his projects have relied on criminal trespass as their chief means of ingress. As the creator of illegal pop-up nightclubs in far-flung locations like Cairo and remote northern Iceland, Mr. Austin is perhaps best known in New York for the Night Heron, a jazz spot he built four years ago in the tank of an out-of-service water tower.

But his current venture is entirely legitimate: It has a liquor license and receives a monthly rent bill from its landlord. Lawfulness aside, it was designed according to Mr. Austin’s signature aesthetic: instilling odd spaces with an odd sense of wonder.

After making a reservation, guests are asked by email to meet him — or his partner, Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer — outside a graffitied metal door in Bushwick. A brief walk through that door and down an alley leads inside to the supply closet. The closet, one discovers, has been transformed into a small, wood-paneled chamber — the sort of place to which a professor emeritus of English might retire to sip his Scotch and page through Keats.

On one wall hangs a panoply of mixological instruments: stirrers, shakers, sterling silver straws, a chemist’s collection of graduated flasks. On the other are shelves of antique glassware, some of which came from Mr. Austin’s grandmother.

The drinks are concocted from a wide array of esoteric liquors and liqueurs, which might on different nights include a custom gin made in Vermont that looks and tastes like whiskey, or a 138-proof “Elixir Vegetal” brewed by the monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France.

The evening isn’t cheap: The going rate is $100 to $120 a head for about an hour of service. For that you get a menu of five or six 3-ounce mini-cocktails, bearing names like Johann Goes to Mexico; you also get the close-quarter company of your partner and your host.

Mr. Sheidlower said the tightness of the Tollbooth has had interesting effects on the clientele. Some have taken a seat and suddenly confessed to sexual peccadilloes; others have fallen into rapt silence. His favorite customers, however, are those who walk in and spontaneously burst into laughter.

“That is the best response of all,” he said.

Threesome Tollbooth, Bushwick, Brooklyn; tickets and reservations at threesometollbooth.tocktix.com; generally open Thursday, Friday and Saturday; no tipping; restroom in the adjacent restaurant.

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