Please Don't Tell

The word has been out for a long time: PDT is a cocktail bar attached to Crif Dogs, a hot doggery in Manhattan’s East Village. Guests enter a phone booth and announce themselves into the phone; the wall opens to reveal the host. There’s no standing room, and availability is limited.

Inside, it’s dark and sparsely decorated, with some moldering taxidermy and a bit of art. There’s a small selection of beer and wine, but cocktails are the thing here, and they’re as complicated as you’d expect after the rigmarole of getting in. If you’re hungry, you can order from an abbreviated Crif Dogs menu. The house specialties come loaded with stuff like kimchi, pastrami, elote, etc. They’re tasty but sloppy, so maybe not ideal for a first date.

The name Please Don’t Tell was always a cute joke. Now that word-of-mouth isn’t much of a thing and influencers—passively farmed-out, small-scale mass media—are an essential part of any small business’s livelihood. PDT came along in 2007 when obscurity was currency. In those proto-social-media days, a hideaway that didn’t get foot traffic (RIP: Chumley’s, the original Angel’s Share, Milk & Honey) survived on favorable real estate terms (also RIP) and/or offering an experience so special that enthusiasm turned infectious, that is, viral. These places required people to tell; they had to be worth telling about. But to stay afloat, PDT needed its target market of cool, discerning grownups to stake their cool cred by telling other cool grownups: this place is worth your while. The cocktail-and-hot-dog speakeasy thing had to be more than a shtick. We now live in an unimaginably different world.

For my first visit in years, I made a reservation. It was a Thursday and the East Village was humming. Waiting in Crif Dogs, I watched a steady stream of excited tourists enter the phone booth, take photos, and walk out, told by PDT’s host that the bar was at capacity and to check back later. My companion and I were seated at the bar, wedged between two other couples. The bartender shook, stirred, and strained with expertise, made recommendations, and answered questions. Still, for all the anticipation stoked by the bar’s elaborate setup, each of our several ~$20 cocktails was surprisingly one-note. In today’s cocktail conversation, they passed like small talk.

Anyone complaining about overexposure in the East Village is playing an old song for a deaf audience. Nothing is a secret anymore. And if it is, you won’t read about it here. What’s clear is that PDT knows the mystique they built over nearly 20 years still gets people in the door. If patrons don’t come back, there’s always the next group of tourists checking it off a list. If you want a low-lit, low-key bar with a 00s hipster New York vibe, cocktails, and hot dogs, that’s what PDT offers. If you love a bit of novelty and aren’t jaded or burdened by high expectations, you’ll have a nice time. If you want to be wowed, I don’t know what to tell you.