How to Pick the Right Sports Bar in New York City

There is no best sports bar in New York, only the right one for your sport. Team bars are the best experience for one fanbase and uncomfortable for everyone else. Volume bars show everything and commit to nothing. The right question is not which bar is best, it is which bar will have your game on, with sound, with people who care.

Ask which sports bar in New York is the best and you will get answers that are all correct and all useless, because they are answering a different question from the one you asked. The bar that is perfect for watching the Bills with three hundred other Bills fans is a strange place to take four colleagues who wanted to half-watch a Tuesday game.

Sports bars in this city sort into three types. Work out which one you need and the shortlist writes itself. We run a gin bar and eatery on East 14th Street that takes a handful of sports very seriously, so this is a view from inside the third category.

The Three Kinds of Sports Bar

The team bar. One fanbase, one allegiance, chants, an official supporters’ club, the game on every screen with the sound up. Magnificent if it is your team. Awkward if it is not, and genuinely uncomfortable if you are wearing the wrong shirt.

The volume bar. Thirty screens, every game available, sound on none of them. Good for finding an obscure fixture. Bad for atmosphere, because nobody in the room is watching the same thing as you.

The bar that happens to be excellent at sport. A proper bar first, with a real kitchen and a real drinks list, that takes specific sports seriously and puts the sound on for them. Better food, better drinks, a mixed room, and the games that matter treated as events rather than wallpaper.

Most people default to searching for the second type when they want the third.

The Question Nobody Asks and Everybody Should

Does the sound go on?

This single question tells you more about a bar’s relationship with sport than screen count ever will. A lot of New York bars run every game muted with a playlist over the top, and for a Tuesday night game that is the correct call, because half the room did not come for the sport. For a match that matters it is unbearable.

What you want is a bar with a policy rather than a habit. Ours is straightforward: games are normally on without sound so the music stays up for everyone else, and the sound goes on for the ones that warrant it, Six Nations rugby, Arsenal, NFL Sundays. If a large enough group asks for a different game, that usually happens too. Ask any bar what their rule is. If they do not have one, they do not think about it.

Match the Bar to the Sport

The sport itself narrows the field faster than anything else, mostly because of when it is played.

• NFL. Sunday afternoons, which every bar in New York is open for. The differentiator is crowd, not availability. A Bills game at a Bills bar is a different sport from a Bills game at a neutral one.
• Premier League and European soccer. Weekend mornings New York time. You need a bar that opens early and has the rights or the stream.
• Rugby. Even earlier, and mostly in February and March. Very few bars in this city genuinely serve it, and we cover that separately on our rugby bar page.
• Baseball, basketball, hockey. Long seasons, many games, low stakes on any individual night. Here you want a bar that is good to sit in, because you will be there for three hours.
• Anything obscure. Ask whether the staff will stream it. Plenty will, given notice.

The Group Problem

Half of sports bar selection is not really about sport. It is about the fact that you are bringing six people and two of them do not care about the game at all.

This is where the team bar fails hardest and where a bar with a kitchen wins. If the food is good, if there is a cocktail list, if there is music playing under the game, then the two people who came for the company have something to do. If the room is a single-purpose shrine with the sound at maximum, they are going to leave at half time.

The practical test: would you go to this bar on a night with no sport on? If the answer is no, it is a bad choice for a mixed group. Our own answer to that question is on our sports bar page.

If You Are Organising Rather Than Just Turning Up

Once your group passes about twelve, stop picking a bar and start booking one. Most venues will hold a section at no cost beyond a minimum spend, and the difference in experience is enormous, because you are not negotiating for screen sightlines with strangers at kickoff.

Ask three things. Can you reserve a section with screens in view. Can the screens in that section be set to your game specifically. Can the group run separate checks. The third one catches people out constantly.

We do all three. The Communal High Top area, the right half of our main bar, holds up to fifty-five standing when it is stanchioned off, and the back room seats twenty with screen access. Fantasy football drafts end up in the back room regularly because groups can project a laptop onto the TVs, which is the sort of thing you only find out by asking. Our fantasy football bar guide covers how those run.

What We Are and What We Are Not

We are a British-style gin bar and eatery at 243 East 14th Street that takes specific sports extremely seriously. European rugby and soccer are the backbone, Arsenal has an unofficial home here, and on NFL Sundays the room turns into a Bills Mafia outpost, complete with Labatt Blue and proper wings. Details on that are on our Buffalo Bills bar page.

We are not a thirty-screen sports hall and we are not trying to be. The kitchen matters here, the cocktail list matters here, and most nights the game is on with music over it. If what you want is every game at once with the sound up, there are better rooms in this city and we will happily tell you so.

For a sense of how particular game days actually run, we have written up NFL Sundays here, what Bills Mafia days look like, and a Super Bowl in this room. The unwritten rules of watching with a mixed crowd are in our bar etiquette piece.

Frequently Asked Questions