The Long Island Bar, Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn

A Brooklyn Bar That Earns Its Place on a Continental List

North America's bar scene in 2025 is not short of places chasing recognition through theatrics: smoke-filled domes, table-side centrifuges, bartenders who double as performance artists. The Long Island Bar is a bar at 110 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill. It ranked #64 on the World's 50 Best North America's Leading Bars list for 2025. That combination, genuine accessibility alongside calibrated craft, has become its own competitive niche, and one that is harder to hold than it looks.

The address itself carries meaning. Atlantic Avenue is one of Brooklyn's older commercial corridors, a stretch that mixes Middle Eastern grocers, hardware suppliers, and low-key restaurants in a way that resists the boutique monoculture of some of the borough's more aggressively curated neighborhoods. A bar that fits that street rather than fighting it is already making an editorial statement about what kind of drinking culture it wants to support. The Long Island Bar fits the block. That is not faint praise.

The Drinks Program: Curation Over Complexity

At a bar that trades in the classic American idiom, the relevant focus is the spirits selection and the approach to the cocktail canon. The bars that hold long-term positions on recognized lists in cities like New York tend to share a common trait: they are not trying to reinvent the wheel on every visit. Instead, they invest heavily in sourcing, selecting spirits at a level of granularity that most venues never bother with, and in the discipline of execution. A well-made Old Fashioned built on a correctly selected rye, properly diluted and served at the right temperature, is a harder achievement than most drinkers recognize.

Within the New York bar market, this places the bar in a specific peer group. Attaboy NYC operates from a similar philosophy of guest-driven, classic-fluent service in a compact, low-ego room. Amor y Amargo narrows further, anchoring its entire program around bitters and amari as a selection philosophy rather than a garnish decision. Angel's Share in the East Village brings Japanese bar culture's precision to a Manhattan address. The bar sits in that cohort, not defined by a single conceptual hook, but by the consistency and seriousness of its program.

Across the broader North American list, the #64 ranking places it alongside operations in cities that have each developed their own bar identity. Kumiko in Chicago is known for Japanese whisky curation and a formal tasting approach. Jewel of the South in New Orleans draws on the city's deep cocktail history. ABV in San Francisco has built around a wine-and-spirits hybrid model. Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu applies Japanese-influenced precision in an unexpected geography. The bar holds its own in that company by representing New York's particular strand of the tradition: confident, no-fuss, and deeply literate about what it pours.

The Room and the Feel of the Place

New York's cocktail culture has moved through several distinct phases over the past two decades. The speakeasy era, secret doors, password entry, Edison bulbs in perpetual amber, gave way to a more transparent, technically oriented model where the program itself became the draw rather than the theatrical wrapper. The bar belongs to neither extreme. The space reads as a recovered classic: a bar that looks like it has been there for decades because, in various forms, it has. The bones are those of a mid-century American bar, and the revival has been careful not to over-restore it into a facsimile of itself.

That aesthetic restraint is harder to achieve than a full renovation. Bars that go too far in either direction, complete modernization or aggressive nostalgia, tend to feel thin. The bar holds a middle register that serves the room's purpose: it is a place where the drink is the point, and the room supports that without competing with it. For comparison, Superbueno takes a bolder visual approach rooted in a specific cultural tradition. Both choices are valid; they are simply serving different intentions.

Cobble Hill in the Context of Brooklyn's Bar Geography

Brooklyn's premium bar scene has historically concentrated in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, with outposts in Park Slope and Fort Greene. Cobble Hill's position on Atlantic Avenue places the bar slightly outside the heavily trafficked corridor, which has practical implications for the experience. The room is less likely to feel like a destination crawl stop and more likely to hold the kind of regular clientele that builds a bar's culture over years rather than seasons. That consistency shows in the review volume: 633 ratings is a number that accumulates through loyalty, not through a single viral moment.

For visitors arriving from Manhattan, the bar is accessible via the borough's subway network, with Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center serving as the major transit hub a short walk away.

How It Compares Beyond New York

Recognition from the World's 50 Best North America's Leading Bars list in 2025 places the bar in a select group of addresses across the continent. The list spans formats from Allegory in Washington, D.C., which takes a storytelling and theatrical approach to its program, to Julep in Houston, which has built its identity around Southern American spirits traditions. The Parlour in Frankfurt on the Main represents European bar culture at a comparable calibre. What distinguishes the list's leading entries is not a shared aesthetic but a shared level of intentionality, every element of the program, from sourcing to service to the physical environment, is the result of considered decisions rather than defaults.

It is not the flashiest room in Brooklyn, nor especially conceptually ambitious. What it is, is consistent and serious, which in the long run is the harder thing to maintain.

Planning Your Visit

The bar is at 110 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11201. The bar is walk-in friendly.