“I normally have a disco ball on my head,” said an agile pole dancer named Whiskey, hired to skate around in circles at the opening last week of Jaywalker (573 Johnson Ave.), the latest bar to pop up among the warehouses along Flushing Avenue borders of East Williamsburg.
Whiskey and her pal, the charismatic Butterfly, were regulars up the street at Xanadu (262 Starr St.), over the border in Bushwick. They came from deep Brooklyn, brought up here by the multicolor lure of the place, the only all-season indoor skate rink in the city, the dream of nightlife connoisseur Varun Kataria, a sort of stoner tribute to the largely forgotten Olivia Newton-John movie.
Nevertheless, located here, it had become the center of a new niche in the neighborhood’s nightlife. Where else has booked has-been Chance the Rapper and the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s reimagination of Rauschenberg’s Pelican? At Xanadu, everything is culture, so it’s fitting that some of it had made its way down past Flushing.
“I think a lot of new things are coming to Bushwick in the near term,” said Allen Katz, the man behind Jaywalker. He seems to know about wilder lives. Bloomberg described him as a self-professed “rye freak” and he can be found in Punch under the line “modern face of New York City’s distilling scene.”
He had started New York Distilling Co. with some of his friends, first in Williamsburg and then later, as the fate of real estate took them, to East Williamsburg, on the shores of Bushwick. Katz had done his market research and had plans to burst into the area’s nightlife.
“From a music standpoint, certainly Elsewhere. And I love going to Xanadu, sort of the sexiest roller skating rink I’ve ever been to in my life,” he told me. This place, built inside a cavernous warehouse, would book hot acts too, he promised. Names to come.
The drinks feature either his Dorothy Parker brand of gin, a commendably popular brand that his deputy Darby Mitchell once assured me could be found “in every major cocktail bar and high end restaurant in Manhattan;” or perhaps the titular Jaywalker whiskey, a rye he once told the New York Times he had been “dreaming of for 13 years.”
The drinks themselves are the creation of Jamie Gordon, once described in Esquire as a “London Academy of Bartenders-trained mixologist.” Katz hired him shortly after selling New York Distilling Co. to Loch Lomond Group, a consortium of British private equity operators who also run the Scottish “Glen’s Vodka,” among other brands.
The money had gotten Katz interested in running a bar again, something he did back at their Williamsburg location, a quiet affair called the Shanty. But this would be bigger. There would be Gordon and his cocktails. Gordon would tell a trade blog that they were influenced by “local flower shops, bodegas and markets.”
“The acquisition by Loch Lomond gave us an immediate interest in, I would say, a more sophisticated outlook on brand building,” Katz told me. Gordon had created a few, the cheapest of which ran for $12, which Katz told me was a nod to the affordability crisis.
“We’re determined to say, ‘How can we come up with a way to create a comfortable access point for people to experience us, particularly for the first time as a new venue?’” Katz said. He made drinking sound like a beautiful experience.
For that price, you could get ice-cold house martinis and Manhattans in glasses that caught the reflection of the brutal gray walls, part of a larger look put together by branding agency Contagious. Around the sides of the bar were new peel-orange booths and tucked behind them were small shelves, topically filled with books about distilling and drinking. Behind the glass was one of the giant gin distilling machines. She’s named “Bernadette,” Mitchell once told me. The walls had to be blasted open to let her in.
Elsewhere on the menu, there was a commendable “Egg Cream,” a whisky-forward drink that the menu warned “contains neither egg nor cream.” It was stiffly mixed, yet nevertheless airy and chocolatey, a hairy cloud on a rainy summer day. I remembered Mitchell telling me that the name ‘Jaywalker’ was an attempt to capture the spirit of rulebreaking, of being bad only slightly.
The room was large and beautiful and, at one point, hosted food popups. More would no doubt come.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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