The bar offers themed flights—everything from pechuga pours to “neighbor” spirits from nearby Sonora.
• Local food trucks, which rotate semi-regularly outside, are more of a fixture than a novelty, part of co founder David Tyda’s food festival roots. Check out one of the mainstays, Provecho, serving Jalisco-inspired tacos, birria and elote.
• Hidden just past the entrance is a small, easy-to-miss bottle shop stocked with rare mezcals and desert-foraged sotols. Feel free to ask what's new.
• On First Fridays (downtown Phoenix’s popular monthly art walk), head to Xico, the gallery that shares the first floor with the bar, before grabbing a drink here.
NICE TO KNOW
Barcoa is a few blocks from Gracie’s, an always-buzzing downtown dive and music spot. Head east a few more blocks and you’ll hit Bikini Lounge—Phoenix’s original tiki bar (cash only). Central Records sits just around the corner, a vinyl-lined cocktail and natural wine bar that also hosts live DJ sets.
NOTABLE AND NEARBY
Barcoa opened in 2021 in a 1920s brick building and immediately felt like it had always been there. Upstairs is all motion: a cantina slinging Cantaritos in clay mugs, Margaritas and Palomas done exactly right, a Batanga served with a steak knife for stirring. Downstairs, things quiet. The room is dark and cool, with cattle skulls wrapped in Huichol beadwork watching over a backlit altar of agave. More than 200 bottles—including mezcal, bacanora, sotol and raicilla—are mapped out in a nearly 40-page textbook, complete with regions and tasting notes, that you can order on their own or in one of the bar’s flights. The downstairs cocktails, like the Elote Moda, built on ancestral corn whisky made from a revived heirloom variety of precolonial Mexican corn and licor de elote, are a little more grown up. Here, you can book a tasting, nerd out or just order a mezcal Margarita and lean against the bar. The education’s there if you want it, but no one’s here to quiz you.
Barcoa Agaveria
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Around the corner on Grand Street, Fresh Kills (from Richie Boccato) has been quietly serving some of the best cocktails in Brooklyn for nearly a decade.
NOTABLE AND NEARBY
• When outdoor seating is available, the wisteria-draped garden (book ahead on Resy) might fool you into thinking you’re somewhere between Louisiana and Provence.
• While Maison excels at the A-list classics, look closely and you’ll find lovingly executed takes on B-side hits, like the Yellow Parrot and the Obituary, that make the case for revival.
NICE TO KNOW
Staff Favorite Dive Bars
Pete's Candy Store
I moved around the corner from Pete’s in 2008, and have found myself wedged into the bar’s tiny back music venue on countless nights since. The crowds may have changed, but Pete’s still maintains a bygone Williamsburg combo of grit, disaffection and surprise and delight. —Talia Baiocchi, editor-in-chief
Happyfun Hideaway
If you’re looking to make out on a dance floor, this no-frills, tropical-themed queer bar is the spot for you. —Irina Groushevaia, senior social media manager
7B Horseshoe Bar
7B stands out from the hoards of East Village icons not only because it opens at noon (ideal for killing time before, well, anything) but because it has one of the friendliest staffs of any bar, let alone dive, in the city. —Chloe Frechette, deputy editor
Sunny’s
This outer fringe of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood is not easily accessible, but it’s worth a trip to experience a bar that’s been resurrected from the brink of closure several times. Live music starts most nights at 8 p.m., and there’s plenty of outdoor space for loitering. Don’t forget to bring cash. —Allison Hamlin, director of network development
An essential guide to the bars and retailers that have turned Oakland into an epicenter of progressive wine culture.
New York’s Essential Martinis
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An essential guide to the bars and retailers that have turned Oakland into an epicenter of progressive wine culture.
The signature cocktail of the original Rogue Cocktails, the Gunshop Fizz uses a full 2 ounces of Peychaud’s bitters.
The Howitzer, the first original cocktail to be featured on a Cure menu, is a bourbon-based riff on the French 75.
In the basement of Barcoa, order rare Mexican spirits from the extensive bottle list.
