![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/aaf97babe9df4b43449116e55a73a66a0c-BarChefNYC-HeirloomGarden.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n An Heirloom Garden cocktail from BarChef.
\n Photo: Courtesy of Leanne Solarik\n <\/p>\n
For anyone looking to access Seed Library<\/a>, the New York outpost of Ryan Chetiyawardana\u2019s London bar, start with the bright-orange door on the side of the Hotel Park Ave. That leads to a narrow hallway, which is followed by a flight of stairs, a dark vestibule, and, eventually, a glowing underground cocktail den.<\/p>\n Despite the subterranean digs, a speakeasy this is not. (The outside door is well-marked, and, again, it is bright orange.) In fact, Chetiyawardana has done away with most of the trappings of speakeasy culture that once proliferated in New York, only to pop up in cities all across the world. For the past few decades, the global cocktail conversation flowed mostly in one direction: New York spoke and the world listened, as our bars \u2014 often with the bartenders involved as active participants and partners \u2014 opened elsewhere.\u00a0But 2025 was the year the trade routes flipped. Four international bars put down roots in the city, bringing their interpretations of international cocktail culture to New York\u2019s drinkers. The trend began in the West Village, when the team behind Tokyo\u2019s SG Club<\/a> opened Sip & Guzzle<\/a>, a bilevel bar on Cornelia Street. Then came Schmuck<\/a>, on First Avenue, a high-concept spinoff of Barcelona\u2019s Two Schmucks<\/a>. Next, Toronto\u2019s BarChef<\/a> brought its \u201cexperiential and multisensory cocktail experience\u201d to 35th Street. And finally, last month, London\u2019s Seed Library<\/a>, the fifth bar in Chetiyawardana\u2019s portfolio and his first permanent foothold in New York.<\/p>\n He says that every expansion starts with the same question: \u201cCan we be an additive part of this landscape?\u201d In New York, he continues, \u201cSeed Library can actually be something that maybe sits in the middle of a couple of different threads.\u201d For Chetiyawardana, those threads are both technical and environmental. Seed Library\u2019s reference points include the listening bars of Tokyo, the youthful energy of Shoreditch, and a reverence for ingredients someone might otherwise find in, say, Copenhagen. \u201cWe wanted to be able to bring a different perspective but for it to feel like it\u2019s for the city,\u201d Chetiyawardana says.<\/p>\n What does New York feel like? \u201cIt\u2019s a quiet confidence,\u201d says Sam Ross, a co-founder of Attaboy and one of the most hands-on participants in defining this city\u2019s cocktail culture. Chetiyawardana has taken that sensibility and shaken it up with a local-ingredient focus typical of his London bars. In New York, that naturally led him to apples, which provide a minerality used to balance a rye Calvados highball.<\/p>\n Schmuck\u2019s menu, too, has the hallmarks of an outsider\u2019s perspective, including another ode to the apple (in this case, an \u201capple colada\u201d with Blanche de Normandie brandy). Schmuck takes equal inspiration from its more immediate neighbors. In October, the rotating menu featured a highball made with \u201ca variety of ingredients from Russo\u2019s grocery store up on 11th.\u201d It tasted, more than anything, like a ham-and-Swiss on rye.<\/p>\n Early to the trend \u2014\u00a0twice \u2014 was Experimental<\/a>, a group whose Parisian-imported Experimental Cocktail Club<\/a> opened in New York in 2012, closed in 2016, and reopened last year. With this second attempt, the group has sought to import a sense of Paris\u2019s after-hours debauchery and a willingness to break the rules occasionally in service of a wild night. \u201cWe have that expression in French culture, un joyeux bordel \u2014 you know, a \u2018happy mess,\u2019\u201d says Xavier Padovani, one of the partners behind Experimental. \u201cWe want to do the best drinks we can, but we want to put the volume up, put the light down, and if people can have fun when they\u2019re having good drinks, that\u2019s the one thing we try to represent as best as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n Experimental occupies an interesting perspective, having explicitly borrowed from New York cocktail culture in 2007 when it opened its first bar, located in Paris, in 2007. The bar was one of the first establishments in France to take the mixology revival seriously. At all these spots, the aim is to blend just enough newness into the mix to show local customers something that feels fresh.<\/p>\n \u201cFamiliar but surprising\u201d is, to Chetiyawardana, the goal of any outside bar trying to make inroads here. \u201cThat\u2019s our job. That\u2019s the bit of the skill \u2014 the translation and the connection.\u201d<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the December 29, 2025, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n