The Grain

Stumbled upon the grain while exploring the city with a visitor. At first didn’t realize that it was inside barn joo so it took some time to find. The atmosphere is fun and exciting and the décor is on point. The drinks are interesting and delicious and the food is amazing! The service was a bit slow since we were getting drinks at 3 pm… I will definitely be back for happy hour (4 – 7 on weekdays) and for dinner too!

Hidden speakeasy-​ish hidden bar located in the basement of Barn Joo. I had 7 pm reservations on a Wednesday night, and when we went down there after our happy hour at Barn Joo, it was so much more quiet and pleasant. I had a boulevardier, which was a little too smooth for me, but nevertheless, I liked the tucked away ambiance down there. And the jazz bad started playing music at around 8 pm, and amazingly, it wasn’t blaring in my ear and was actually pleasant to be next to!
You can order food down there as well, with a very similar menu to Barn Joo. So if you want some good whiskey and Barn Joo food, make reservations to come hear instead of upstairs.
Oh and the phone you use to call down to The Grain? The audio is terrible (made worse by the loud Barn Joo music), so after the hostess said something I couldn’t understand that sounded like a broken fast food drive thru speaker, I shrugged and headed down there. Fun times. Secret doors are always cool.

I have been to a lot/​most of the well reviewed cocktail and speakeasy type bars in nyc. I am pleased to report the grain has been an excellent experience for myself and the group I was with. The service was friendly, very friendly. Just be cool with them and they will return the favor! The most impressive thing is defiantly the drink menu! As a bourbon and rare liquor collector, they have some awesome choices to offer, not to mention some standard favorites! The food is nothing to scoff at either, finally a cocktail lounge with great food! So my recommendation, come during the happy hour at bar joo, upstairs before 7, enjoy some great cocktails and cheap oysters/​calamari/​fried chicken. Then make yourself downstairs and sample the different whiskeys or cocktails, if unsure the bar manager is very knowledgeable and he will make some solid recommendations! Can’t wait to come back and chill. Almost forgot, live jazz, amazing! Just icing on the already delicious cake.

Located under Barn Joo, you enter this jazz bar through a hidden door well camouflaged into the wall. They serve basically the same menu as Barn Joo and have a cocktail list as well as an extensive whiskey selection. Drinks are a bit pricey ($ 15) however they were very alcoholic and will get a good buzz going. They have a similar «barn» feel with more Americana vibes as opposed to the Korean fusion décor upstairs. We sat at the bar and had a few drinks and enjoyed the atmosphere and live music. Highly recommend to check this place out if you want to have a chill night with friends.

WOW !!! Cool entrance, food was out of this world, i am in the industry for 15 years and it is not that easy for me to be impressed…
Too many whisky, not to worry, Blake will be there to help your questions and for sure he will find your liking…
Bartender Milos, very knowledgeable, very very hospitable, right attitude, right moves, from greeting to farewell he is right on point, he makes you feel like you are at his home, and will go above and beyond for his guests…
Well done guys, i will be back, at least once a week, to see you and to taste again the tiger roll sushi and the fried beef dumplings.
Not to mention Blake’s duck fat infused whisky, live music and a secretly kept place…
Go, you will only love it.

Cool spot. Awesome for drinks, super low key and awesome jazz music. Such a find! Not too badly
Priced drinks, recommend the chicken bites, Brussels sprouts and fries!

The Grain is a speakeasy inside Barnjoo, I believe the restaurant itself is about a year old so its brand new in the grand scheme of things. The entrance which I won’t spoil, is amazing and what a speakeasy should be like. The coolest entrance I’ve seen until this point was PDT’s famous telephone booth but this one tops it because it’s staring right at you yet it’s not visible. Anyhow there is a LIVE BAND inside, a full dinner menu, and a ton of drinks. Drinks were great, I don’t recommend the popcorn chicken, its like general tso’s but aside from that the actual Korean dishes were great.

Apparently this place is so secretive that I forgot to review it.
Been to Barn Joo a couple times and didn’t know about The Grain. It was only after I Unilocaled the place and realized the address was the same. There is a chalkboard sign outside Barn Joo advertising The Grain, but it’s easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. You check in with the hostess, who leads you to a secret door in the wall and you descend the stairs to the speakeasy below. The concealment and secrecy provides a nice effect.
Downstairs is surprisingly quiet and loungey, with a much more intimate vibe than the upstairs chaos of Barn Joo. We seated ourselves at the bar for a pre-​dinner drink. The drink menu is expanded from upstairs, and the ones we had were just as good as what we had before at Barn Joo. They also appear to play live music as well, though there wasn’t any at the time we were there. Definitely a nice spot for a date.

One of the better kept secrets out of the secrets that are out.
Amazing atmosphere with live music! Great first date or a friendly catch up spot.
two thumbs up

Well well well, aren’t you a nicely kept secret?! After planning to meet for dinner at Barn Joo, myself and my dining partner for the evening found ourselves in a bit of a predicament. We both really wanted to spin the Barn Joo wheel (we can get free things?! Why the Hell not!!!). Unfortunately, the items won off the wheel does not transfer to dinner and drink service downstairs (where The Grain is situated). (Un)fortunately, depending on one’s POV, me managed to land on the worst item on the wheel: a «free» high five. Needless to say, we were devastated, distraught, disheartened, despondent, crestfallen… But as they say, when the door shuts in your face, there’s always a window that opens (so we can jump out).
And we made the jump to The Grain. After losing out on free (wheel) things, we asked the hostess as to seating here. Surprisingly, more people were waiting for seating at Barn Joo as opposed to checking out the downstairs (I honestly believe the lack of reciprocity for potentially free things from the wheel is enough of a deterrent for this phenomenon). Thusly, there was available downstairs @ The Grain. A 1920s telephone served as the means to inquire as to seating for the downstairs, and a fake wall separated the threshold of The Grain from Barn Joo. Food menu was (allegedly) the same, enhanced drink options, and a sultry songstress and jazz band made available for our pleasure… not a bad setup methinks.
The vibe was completely different from the also pleasant yet hectic atmosphere found upstairs. Soft lighting and small tables made for an intimate setup. Despite close proximity of our table with the adjacent tables, myself and my partner in crime that evening could use relatively quiet inside voices and still converse effectively; it helped that our neighbors were conducting themselves in similar fashion.
The drink menu sported a decent selection of specially made cocktails. It had enough variety without being overly robust to the point that selection of a drink would be too much of a chore. I started with a gimlet, switched to another din based drink in the form of «Aviation», and closed the night was a very stiff Manhattan. All drinks were to my liking and had me feeling all warm and fuzzy.
As having partook in Barn Joo’s food menu at a previous visit, I can say that the food here did not disappoint. Excellently prepared soy garlic wings (so crunchy) and tasty truffle fries to start. The scallion pancake was a bit think, but I liked the addition of some fresh greens on top. However, the crispy calamari tacos were terrific. Guac and fried squid go together really well!
After having lengthy conversations about important things (zodiac signs, politics, high school, etc.) to the musical stylings of a very jazzy band and equally jazzy songstress… we departed from this place. It goes without question that The Grain now has a special place on my list of places to go to. Hopefully, Barn Joo’s wheel of fortune remains too enticing of a deterrent for people to not realize what they’re missing down here.

Another bar that’s way too full of itself. The service here is so rude and arrogant that you wonder if it’s a velvet rope to a Vegas night club and not just a dingy bar underneath a Korean restaurant.
I made a reservation for a table for 8 for a friend’s going away. It turned out we were going to have a few more friends then expected so another friend reserved another table for 8. When we go there, it was pretty dead — as I knew it normally is on a Saturday night. We had two tables relatively separated from each other but that was totally cool because we booked the tables separately.
We were there about an hour and the manager comes up to me, and announces to me and everyone at the table whether we knew the people at the table at the other end of the bar. We said yes, and he tells us that it’s not acceptable. That we are not allowed to know those people, that a table of 8 is really pushing it, that he is going to start turning away people, that they try to maintain an empty vibe at the bar (what the??) and we can’t have people here like that. He continued to say that he will «let is slide this time, but you better remember and tell all your friends that next time we won’t be so lenient.» Exact words. Seriously? Get the F outta here. «Let it slide??» Be «lenient this time??» «Next time??» There are SO many things wrong with that statement that it’s not even worth going through them all.
It’s one thing if the bar is packed, or if we were being super loud. But it was none of these things. And even it it were, the way to handle it would be to just pull someone aside and talk to them rather than throw a bitch fit and yell at us like we are some kids. We are grown adults, most in their 30’s, and we were just chilling, sipping on cocktails and hanging out. Besides the fact that the bar was pretty dead and even with us there — there were a good number of empty tables. Apparently, the goal of this bar is to «keep an empty vibe» and not have people go there, and threaten folks for being there.
This is so typical of NYC bars. They forget that this is NYC, that there are a million bars at every corner in this town. There is no need for customers to receive this type of rude service and keep going back. We certainly will not.

A very pleasant surprise, considering this was an impromptu trip after getting dinner at Barn Joo. Located downstairs through a very secretive doorway at Barn Joo, The Grain requires you to check in with the host/​hostesses up front before they’ll let you into the speakeasy. It’s definitely low-​key, but fairly easy to find, given that there’s a chalkboard sign outside advertising The Grain.
The downstairs was far from crowded, maybe because it was a Wednesday night, but nonetheless, it was pretty awesome that there was room to sit for large groups and small ones, and it was still fairly active throughout the night. We ordered the sidecar, the hanky panky, and one of the whiskey flights. Unbeknownst to us, the whiskey flights were actually 2oz pours, which really caught us off guard. But the hanky panky was really the crown jewel of the night. Using a lot of barrel-​aged spirits, the hanky panky had the taste of an old fashioned, with a hint of dryness from the Beefeater gin, but really just went down smoothly. Holy cow, it was good.
Service was pretty lax, but it was fine, because we got time to enjoy the live jazz, which goes on from 8pm-​11pm, and we didn’t order food, so it wasn’t like we were hungry. One thing you should realize is that Barn Joo’s full menu is available downstairs at the Grain, so even if you would like to try BJ’s food AND the cocktails of the grain, you can easily do so. It should also be known that they do place an emphasis on spirits that are distilled/​brewed locally, so it’s nice to know that there’s a bit of social responsibility involved in their business.
In all, The Grain has instantly become one of my favorite speakeasies, mostly because the quality of the drinks is great, and it lacks the pretentiousness and crazy wait times of some of the other speakeasies in Manhattan. I’ll definitely be back for date night, to try all their different offerings. Make sure to go on a night when there’s live jazz, so you can soak in all that romantic ambiance.

«Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets».
What. A. Find. How does the Grain not have more reviews? While I can’t speak for the jazz here, I’m guessing it wouldn’t change my feelings about this place. Given my love for the Flatiron Room, I’m a fan of having some jazz with my whiskey every so often. Ron Swanson/​Duke Silver is my spirit animal. While I’m sure bar at Barn Joo is decent, this hidden underground lounge is the way to go if you find yourself wanting a drink before (and/​or after) dinner.
Came here on a Thursday evening with a friend to grab a drink before our dinner at Barn Joo. Like previous reviewers have mentioned, this isn’t a true speakeasy (What even IS a true speakeasy anymore? Nothing is secret anymore… sigh). There’s a sign for The Grain outside as well as an advertisement for live jazz. That said, it certainly feels like a speakeasy. To get in, you need to pick up an old-​school phone hanging next to a faux bookcase and let the folks downstairs know how many people are in your party. The bookcase/​wall will then open to a staircase, which will lead you into this lovely establishment.
I was between 4 and 5 stars on The Grain, but the ambiance here pushes it over the edge for me. It’s classy but not snobby — cool/​trendy yet still down to earth. That is a really really difficult balance to strike, and The Grain does it effortlessly (well, that’s probably false… it’s very clear that a lot of effort went into making this place the oasis that it is). Hovering over the good number of tables that line the wall here is a glowing wall of whiskey. In my limited experience, this seems to be a staple of whiskey bars. I say glowing because the lighting in the Grain is fairly low, so the warmly-​lit shelves of whiskey beautifully offset the general vibe of the space. If it isn’t clear yet, I can’t praise this place enough for its ambiance. Just perfect. My friend and I were in full agreement about this.
Because we had reservations at Barn Joo, we only stuck with drinks here. They’ve got a decent cocktail list — nothing that unique/​adventurous, but a lot of good classics with a handful of Grain originals (the latter being mostly whiskey-​based). Given that it’s finally fall, I was 100% in the mood for whiskey. I ended up ordering — after some back-​and-​forth with one of the awesome bartenders — a High West Double Rye. Wow, that’s some good stuff. Before drinking my first sip of fall whiskey — conveniently accompanied by a dropper with cold spring water (pictured) — the other bartender asked me if I knew the story about what I was about to drink. He told me about the specific distillery, what it means to be drinking this particular double rye (I hadn’t tried a double rye — a young, vibrant rye mixed with a richer aged rye), etc. I always appreciate a bit of education when I’m trying new whiskeys, so this was a lovely touch to the whole experience.
«Never half-​ass two things. Whole-​ass one thing.»

This is a great spot with live jazz and good cocktails. The food is delicious and is a great back drop to good friends hanging out or an intimate date. Either way, I will be coming back for more delicious food and entertainment.

Came across this hidden gem by accident while trying to have a celebration dinner at barn joo. As I walked n they told me it would be a 15 min wait for a seat or I could enjoy a bar down stairs with the same dinner menu and live music! It couldn’t get better than this.
What to eat?
Uni bimbimbop so worth my $ 21
–have you felt that when you get bimbimbop, that there is too much rice and not enough meat and veggies, well, no worries here! And don’t be fooled with the small looking plate… It was actually quite filling
–at first I was expecting a small amount of uni, but then a bunch of other fish eggs came along with it!
–Yum x 10 000
–I was a little hesitant to get this dish because I had a bad experience with uni at another restaurant in the past… But this mixture if Uni and caviar felt like heaven in my mouth!
— I absolutely loved the egg they had emersed in sauce
–120% recommend this dish
Truffle fries
— great truffle taste and seasoning
–downfall is its a small amount and if you love fries as much as I do, you may want to get your own and not share!
–another down fall in my opinion is the type of fries they use… they are in between the size of burger king and steak fries… I usually like mine as thin a s McDs but it’d all preference so if you dont mind the size go for it.
–on the plus side… You get Chipotle sauce !
Setting:
Absolutely love the ambiance and feel of this place. It’s very classy and not grimmy. But on one is there to judge, I came in with my work out clothes.
Live music — I went when there was a live jazz band on a Wednesday night. They were super good and kept an up tone tune throughout the night.
Overall: my new place to kick it at and enjoy a chill setting with amazing music!!!

Regardless of whether you want to call this a speakeasy or not this place is pretty cool. At the front ask to go to The Grain, not the bar if you want to go here.
Live jazz (meaning it’s going to be loud), so don’t expect a quiet night. Lots of drinks to choose from, but more whiskey than cocktails since this is a whiskey bar. They also have food that they serve in the normal restaurant here too.
Good service, no complaints!
*typical speakeasy prices for drinks

The Grain isn’t exactly a speakeasy (as they have a sandwich board out front advertising live jazz hours from 8 – 11) and there’s a sign near the hidden door telling you to check in with the Barn Joo host/​hostess before heading down yourself. But hey, if you have to go through a false wall to find the bar, then I consider it a speakeasy.
Once you’re downstairs, there’s a small music performance area, a surprisingly large number of tables, and a bar with a handful of seats.
Like most speakeasies, they serve cocktails (a lot of the standards, plus a few signature ones). The Sazerac I had was pretty decent. A bit pricey (especially compared to happy hour upstairs at Barn Joo), but on par with Manhattan cocktail bar prices. They also have a ton of whiskeys available.
Didn’t try any of the food, but I’ve eaten at Barn Joo before, and their bar food is decent, so I imagine it’s about the same down in the basement.
Bathrooms are single occupancy. Just look for the sign that points you to the «Fart Zone».

Came here with a large group for a birthday dinner. I made reservations for 12 people and they were super easy to work with. They usually do not take reservations for more than 8 people, but they made the exception for us as it was a special event.
We tried their BJ tacos, brussel sprouts, their spicy chicken pot and their grilled shrimp. Everything was pretty good. I think their brussel sprouts and their spicy chicken was the best. I was not a big fan of the rice that came with the shrimp. The sauce was sweet, but others seemed to like it.

Late Friday night, I was in the neighborhood and everywhere was completely packed and loud; the opposite of how I wanted to spend my night. I remember hearing about this place and we walked over to the address. You walk in through the restaurant Barn Joo and ask for The Grain. The host will show you to a sort of hidden door to the right of the restaurant. You walk down the stairs into an intimate bar. Up front was a jazz band playing live music.
We walked to the back and sat at the bar. It looked very sleek and stocked with liquors and fresh ingredients. The menu is extensive with well priced whiskeys, house made liquors, house aged cocktails, and other interesting options. We had 6 of their cocktails ($ 15 each) and each one was meticulously crafted by handsome gentlemen wearing plaid. They also had a limited menu of food made in the Barn Joo kitchen that I would like to try next time.
A very nice spot for a night out with friends or a date night. Good atmosphere and crowd.

A bit quiet and on the down low right now, which is a great thing.
Plenty of whiskey from locations I didn’t even know produced whiskey.
Live jazz that didn’t suck.
You can also order food down here. (can’t recommend the duck confit enough)