Keepers

Picture it: you're 11 again, your skin smelling of fresh grass, a jersey still stuck to your back with old sweat. But you don't care; it's a badge of honor now that your team (soccer, football, basketball or whatever activity you decided to play) has finally won. The reward? Dinner with all your teammates at the trusty pizzeria down the street since victories are best celebrated over sauce and cheese. Bottling that feeling is Keepers, a new tavern in the West Village where the pizzas are crisp, the energy is lively and the nostalgia is at an all-time high.

Keepers throws it back, hard, so much so the tavern looks like a night out for the Brady Bunch kids. Posters of Super Fly, Bob Dylan, and old cigarette ads paper the walls, Indiana Jones plays on repeat on the TV, and glittering green diner chairs push up against dinette tables. And on practically every one of those tables you'll find a pizza, or a lone metal rack, ready and waiting for one.

It would be easy to assume that Keepers is a pizzeria, yes? Not exactly: 22 cocktails outweigh the 10 pies on the menu, courtesy of Ricky Dolinsky, who previously served as the beverage director of The View. And most of those cocktails are negronis. Listed as "negronis" and "negronis continued," the classic cocktail plays nice with fragrant peppercorns and shiso (Jaded in Japan), keeps it local with gin from Brooklyn's Greenhook Ginsmiths and apertivio from Forthave Spirits (aptly named The Local) and dances with a splash of Kirsch and speer of blood red cherries (Witch of the Black Forest). If you don't fancy a negroni, you'll surely fancy the seriously delightful cherry-vanilla cream paloma, with deep cherry notes and a cloud-like foamy head that tastes of vanilla and a bit of salt before evaporating. 

But of course, the longer you sit in a room that smells of cheese and dough, the more likely you are going to end up ordering something. But the pizza here isn't New York-style, as Louis Tomczak, formerly of Paulie Gee's, specializes in floppy-disk-thin pies; attempting to fold them will cause breakage. If you don't mind the crackery, tavern-style variation, then you likely won't mind the Al Capone, freckled with fennel-forward sausage cups and hot giardiniera that brings a bit of spice to the party. The dessert pie will please your inner twelve-year-old, particularly if you ever experienced the holy grail of Dunkaroos in your lunchbox, as the pie is swirled with a chunk of cinnamon streusel, frosting and handfuls of rainbow sprinkles all over it 

The tavern wants to feel like a pizza party, and it does, but there's a disconnect when cocktails sit in cool glassware starting at $21 next to pizzas served on paper plates. The food lacks the finesse of its cocktail program, like the Italian chopped salad, which seems tossed together by mom, who cubed big chunks of salami and cheese with her good knife and threw them over hunks of iceberg lettuce. As far as pizzas go, the stracciatella cheese on the Vodka Chiky Parm becomes runny within seconds, and the vodka sauce needs more oomph to liven up the chicken, which was rather bland.

But seeing as how New York, and damn near an entire generation, is nostalgic for a time now past, Keepers certainly knows how to keep things fun.