How the “Secret” Bar Took Over the World

Editor’s note: In celebration of Imbibe’s 20th anniversary in 2026, Wayne Curtis will be turning his attention to modern cocktail history for each Mixopedia column this year. First up: Speak easy…

The first rule of the modern speakeasy is that there are rules. Lots of them. No hooting or hollering, no lingering outside the door, no men addressing unaccompanied women, no fighting or even joking about fighting. If joy was allowed, it was to be expressed quietly.

These were among the house rules cast in bronze and bolted to the bathroom door at New York’s Milk & Honey, the influential Lower East Side cocktail bar that opened without fanfare on New Year’s Eve 2000. There was no sign. You either knew, or you didn’t.

“The speakeasy idea was an accident.”—Sasha Petraske

Word, of course, got out anyway—elegant service, revelatory drinks, total departure from the sloppy late-night bar norm—and “then the floodgates opened,” founder Sasha Petraske later told craft-cocktail pioneer Dale DeGroff. Not wanting to provoke his landlord or neighbors, Petraske kept the door locked, restricted entry, and enforced etiquette with monastic calm. Beloved regulars got keys. Everyone else called a closely guarded phone number. A new kind of bar took shape almost incidentally. “The speakeasy idea was an accident,” he told DeGroff.

The aughts were the gilded age of this accidental idea. Cocktail culture was just beginning to reawaken, and bartenders wanted to signal that these weren’t your grandfather’s bars—nor the bottle-service disco dens of the ’90s. Referencing pre-Prohibition drinking provided a kind of origin myth. Exclusive, but not smug. Serious, but not solemn. Speakeasies dressed themselves as vintage, but at the time they felt startlingly new.

Milk & Honey’s blueprint was quickly adapted and expanded: PX in Alexandria, Virginia (2006), Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco (2006), The Edison in Los Angeles (2007), the Violet Hour in Chicago (2007), Green Russell in Denver (2010), Viceroy in Grand Rapids (2010), among others.

And then there was PDT—Please Don’t Tell—in New York’s East Village (2007), perhaps the most enthusiastically publicized “secret” bar of them all. No sign, of course. You entered by walking into a hot dog shop a few steps below street level and stepping into a phone booth in the back. You lifted the receiver and gave your name. If you’d scored one of the day’s reservations—they always vanished within minutes—the back of the booth swung open onto a low-lit bar with taxidermy, a place that had the feel ofan opium den hidden beneath the Museum of Natural History.

PDT came with its own guide for etiquette: no swearing, no phone calls, no board games (including, specifically, Scrabble). Co-founder Jim Meehan insists the secrecy wasn’t strictly marketing—the bar had to piggyback on Crif Dogs’ liquor license—but also reflected a shift in the purpose of bars themselves. “The bar went from a necessary part of a functioning social society to just another entertainment venue,” he says. “Bars and restaurants had to compete with all the other entertainment options. We understood that PDT needed to be fun, and it needed to be outrageous.” With the launch of Instagram in 2010, being a little outrageous became all the more essential. Social media platforms were perfect spots for cool hunters to display their trophies. The so-called secret bars were soon anything but.

Imitators bloomed everywhere. Unaffiliated bars named PDT cropped up in Edinburgh and Mumbai (the former entered through a red London-style phone booth), and in Michigan there is a speakeasy bar called IDC (“I Don’t Care,” billed as “Grand Rapids’ most talked-about secret”).

“Between 1995 and 2005, I spent just as much time functioning as an intermediary between failed and successful mating attempts as I did anything else,” Meehan says. Bartending was part drink service, part romantic triage. With the rise of the speakeasies and the new etiquette playbooks, that all started to change. As Milk & Honey instructed: “Gentlemen will not introduce themselves to ladies. Ladies, … if a man you don’t know speaks to you, please lift your chin slightly and ignore him.”

In rewriting the rules, speakeasies established a space and spotlight for the rise of the craft cocktail.

In rewriting the rules, speakeasies established a space and spotlight for the rise of the craft cocktail. The role of bars subtly but publicly pivoted from being places one loudly socialized, sought mates, and indulged in misbehavior to a stage with the drink as protagonist rather than prop.

“My goal at PDT from the beginning was to take the conventions of the dining room at Gramercy Tavern and bring them to a bar,” Meehan says. In a dining room, no one stands behind you waiting for your seat. No one yells over your shoulder.

Today, the secret entrances may be less secret and the rules of behavior less enforced, but the spell they cast endures. Every dimly lit bar with a passing reverence for ice and etiquette owes something to that moment when a handful of locked rooms turned drinking back into ritual—and reminded us that mystery can be the best garnish of all.

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