The Coziest Bar in New York, Statistically

Literally, ranked.

The past few weeks have been dark. LA burned, Elon Musk is LBO’ing the federal government, and I’ve been writing about sports gambling addiction and ruminating on this scary tweet from a recently-departed safety researcher at OpenAI.

This all made me want to write about something lighter this week. I think it is important to enjoy your life in the midst of turbulence, and to do so with some urgency. It has been cold in New York and I recently read this article by

Natasha Stagg

which made me realize how much I wanted to be staring into a fireplace, sipping a hot toddy in a dark old bar where they take your phone at the door and break it:

I should be prioritizing bars with fireplaces now, like the one at the Marlton Hotel. It would be great to have a definitive list of these!

So, I figured I would create a definitive¹ list of the coziest such bars.

To do this I used serpapi to search google maps for “cozy bar” and “fireplace bar” at a few different locations around the city and scrape the reviews of the results. This got me to a big list of reviews, like this one at the Marlton Hotel bar in that Natasha mentioned (it is a lovely place, also open for coffee during the day, just above Washington Square park):

Then, I counted the number of reviews that mentioned either “cozy” or “fireplace” and took them as a percentage of the total reviews of each bar. I’m interested in bars where the fireplace and coziness are central to the experience, and I figure bars where people mention these things most have a good chance of delivering.

Looking at a scatterplot of mentions of “fireplace” vs. “cozy,” there are a few bars that are pretty obviously on the efficient frontier of coziness:

Dynaco in bed-stuy, Marlton Espresso Bar in the village (mentioned above), and Black Mountain Wine House in Gowanus each have over 15% of reviews mentioning both Cozy and Fireplace, with Black Mountain Wine House coming in at nearly 35% of reviews mentioning coziness. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Black Mountain but it embodies cozy maximalism, with adirondack chairs out front and a firelit interior. I’ll do some in-person research soon to see if it lives up to its number 1 billing. I’m glad to see them doubling down on their value prop on their instagram:

If we’re not so concerned about a fireplace and we’re open to any particularly cozy bar, we add places like Mayflower in Fort Greene (wonderfully cozy spot), Wine Escape in Hell’s Kitchen and Cello in Midtown:

Let me know if you have any other nominees! I hope you have as snug a week as possible.

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While you are browsing google maps deciding where to go sit by the fire and read this week, you should listen to my friend Sawyer’s new song, which is beautiful and uses a photo I took as cover art (I wish I could find these two french kids and thank them for sitting on such a poetically desolate spot):

1. Definitive here means “subjective, and subject to my whims”