Lifestyle
T.J. Byrnes, a No-Frills Irish Pub, Draws a Martini Crowd
Misty Gonzales has been tending bar at T.J. Byrnes, an Irish pub in the Financial District of Manhattan, for 13 years. For most of that time, she has served office workers, college students and city employees.
Two years ago, she noticed some unfamiliar faces. This new crowd was younger and usually stopped in for poetry readings, book-club gatherings and parties. Aside from their age, their drink orders set them apart.
“Martinis are the biggest thing — I couldn’t even get over how many people are drinking martinis,” Ms. Gonzales said. “Lots of Negronis, too.”
In the past year, the pub has hosted talks led by the art critic Dean Kissick, a holiday party for the leftist publication Dissent, a monthly reading series called Patio, a performance-art karaoke competition and a pre-Valentine’s Day party for single readers of Emily Sundberg’s Substack newsletter Feed Me.
Some of Ms. Sundberg’s 180 guests were initially confused by the choice of location.
“This was the first time people have texted me before being like, ‘What is this place?’” said Ms. Sundberg, 30, who first went to the bar for a friend’s birthday a couple years ago.
“I wouldn’t go as far as to call it the new Clandestino,” she added, referring to the downtown bar that is often bursting at the seams along Canal Street. “But if you have brand events — magazine parties, readings — it’s become a venue.”
At first glance, T.J. Byrnes might seem like an unlikely draw for writers, artists and fashion types. The bar is nestled in an austere plaza behind a Key Foods grocery store, at the base of a 27-story residential building. The facade looks onto a courtyard it shares with a preschool and a diner. The interior is unassuming, with a dark wooden bar in the front and white tablecloths and red leather booths in the back.
The bar’s eponymous owner, Thomas Byrne, 70, can be found most evenings at a cluttered desk just inside the dining room or perched at a hightop near the entrance, keeping an eye on the scene. In a pinch, he pulls pints behind the bar.
“I am very hands-on,” said Mr. Byrne, who has a neat mustache and typically wears a button-down shirt tucked into black trousers. He commutes into the city daily from Yonkers, where he has lived for the last 32 years. “I’m not saying I never take a day off, but I’m here a lot of the time, and I like that.”
The youngest of three, Mr. Byrne immigrated from County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1972 to join his brothers in New York, where they made their livings working in bars. With his brother Seamus, he ran a pub on Fordham Road in the Bronx from 1975 to 1991.
After they closed that spot, his brother Denis came across a vacant Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street. It needed some serious remodeling, but its sheer size and proximity to some of Manhattan’s busiest office buildings made it too good to pass up. After months of construction, T.J. Byrnes opened its doors in October 1995.
With the exception of a brief window during the city’s Covid lockdowns, the pub has been open nearly every day for the last 30 years.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’re still here,’” Mr. Byrne said. “We went through Sept. 11, we went through Sandy, the big storm and all that, and tough times. But you just hang in there, and it works out.”
Mr. Byrne recalled finally getting through police barricades the day after the attacks on the twin towers to find the bar, helmed by his brother, teeming with people from the neighborhood.
“So many people came in here just to be together,” he said. “People were in distress, and this was a meeting place to sit down and talk.”
T.J. Byrnes has always had an eclectic clientele, he said. City workers from 100 Gold St. mingled with musical theater students from Pace University. Office employees, retirees from St. Margaret’s House apartment community and residents of Southbridge Towers sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. But it seemed to take a specific confluence of events to get a more artsy crowd in the door.
It might have started in 2022, when the writer Ezra Marcus sang the bar’s praises in the Perfectly Imperfect recommendation newsletter. “Byrnes is a holdout against the mass extinction of normal places for normal people to get a drink in the city,” Mr. Marcus, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, wrote.
A couple months later, Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online subcultures, called T.J. Byrnes the “new Forlini’s” in an article for Artnet, likening it to the red-sauce restaurant that had unexpectedly become a downtown cool-kid haunt in the years before it shuttered.
At the same time, the micro-neighborhood a few blocks from Forlini’s known as Dimes Square was becoming overexposed and — with the arrival of an opulent boutique hotel and fine dining establishments — a bit too upscale for some.
“It just has a better vibe,” Mr. Citarella said on a recent evening at T.J. Byrnes, where he was hosting a reading group with the author Mike Pepi. “With the transformation of downtown New York, everything has turned into condos; it doesn’t feel like anything is authentic or is here to stay.”
The South Street Seaport area that surrounds T.J. Byrnes has undergone its own changes. Once a gritty neighborhood celebrated by the writer Joseph Mitchell for its fish markets, the district has been transformed over the decades, most recently by large real estate investments, new shopping destinations and independent art galleries like Dunkunsthalle, located in an old Dunkin’ Donuts on Fulton Street.
When McNally Jackson Books opened its Seaport location in 2019, making it a hub for literary events, T.J. Byrnes became a favorite post-reading spot.
Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, was introduced to the bar after one of those McNally Jackson events. He took to it right away. Although T.J. Byrnes is unusually spacious for the city — another point in its favor — he described it as “beautifully cozy.”
When his debut novel, “See Friendship,” was published this month, he decided to throw a book party there.
With a lineup of readers and an open bar, Mr. Gordon invited around 60 of his friends to fete his book. The crowd sipped vodka sodas and hung out in the “many little pockets” of the space, which includes a large dining room and a side area that’s more tucked away.
“It is the type of place that I hope continues to exist for as long as I live in the city,” he said.
For some, it is a necessary counterbalance to fussy bars and restaurants that cater to the TikTok crowd or to those seeking experiences behind red ropes.
“I don’t want a concept,” said Alex Hartman, who runs the satirical meme account “Nolita Dirtbag,” railing against what he sees as a trend of bars spending exorbitantly on interior design that panders to the downtown creative class. People are “protesting this sort of aesthetic lifestyle,” he added.
With reasonably priced bars in short supply and a surge of private clubs taking over nightlife, T.J. Byrnes, with its lack of pretense, is an antidote.
“It’s the anti-members club,” Ms. Sundberg said. “There’s this huge cohort of New York City who wants to get into this locked, password protected, paywall door — and then T.J. Byrnes is right there.”
Mr. Byrne keeps track of his bar’s events and parties by hand, in a hardcover planner. Many people looking to entertain there simply text him to reserve the space — no fee or bar minimum required.
“I like the people that come here for the artist group,” Mr. Byrne said. “They’re really nice to deal with and enjoy the place, and we enjoy having them here.” During readings, he often listens from a spot toward the back.
On a recent Friday night, the furniture designer Mike Ruiz Serra celebrated his 28th birthday at T.J. Byrnes with about 100 friends. His guests downed pints of Guinness, sipped martinis and Negronis, and ordered classic bar fare like mozzarella sticks.
Away from the party, Andy Velez was closing his tab. Mr. Velez, who works for the City of New York in data communications, has been coming to T.J. Byrnes after work for 17 years, usually a few times a week.
“This is my ‘Cheers,’” he said.
Even when the crowd started to swell, as it was then, Mr. Velez said that the bar was almost never too loud to have a conversation.
“This is a very special place, a staple of the community,” he said. “Only people in the neighborhood really know about this.”
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
Admission: I suffer from eyestrain. Even right this very second. As a reporter working on a computer more than eight hours most days, my eyes often feel fatigued and itchy by evening.
I’m not alone: More than half of the U.S. population lives with computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eyestrain, and nearly 16.4 million Americans suffer from dry eye syndrome. So I was especially excited to stumble on New Vogue Spa, in the City of Industry, which offers a relaxing, if intriguing, treatment called “Eyeball Care” — something I’d never heard of before at a day spa.
New Vogue Spa is an Asian-style spa with Korean and Chinese influences. The spa’s offerings include massages and body scrubs — I was curious about the “Red Wine Body Scrub” — but I couldn’t help exploring eyeball care, which was much needed after my 50-minute drive from Silver Lake. (The City of Industry is about 30 minutes from downtown L.A. without heavy traffic.)
So it came to be that I found myself lying on a massage table, wearing what looked like protruding diving goggles, with clouds of cool, aromatic steam oozing from both sides of it and engulfing my face. A spindly plastic tube extended from my forehead to the “Eye Spa” machine. Serene spa music, a blend of classical piano and loudly chirping birds, trilled in the background as the machine sloshed and gurgled. It felt like lying, creekside, in a spa robe wrapped in a blanket of chamomile and rosemary-scented fog.
-
Share via
As my esthetician, Jenny Chen, adjusted the eye mask and added essential oils to the mist, New Vogue manager Lesley Xie explained that the 60-minute, $125 Eyeball Care treatment aims to hydrate and stimulate blood circulation in the eye area, decrease puffiness and dark circles and aid eye fatigue and dry eye syndrome.
“It’s really helpful for overall eye health for people who are on computers for a long time or sleep really late or who are reading a lot,” she said.
2
1. The Eyeball Care treatment included a mask filled with cool, aromatic steam to help relieve fatigued eyes. 2. Slippers in the Himalayan Salt Room.
Xie said that eyeball care treatments are common in China. When she was growing up in Guangdong in Southern China, elementary school students were given a break every afternoon to perform “eye exercises,” which involved gently massaging pressure points around their eye areas, for 5-10 minutes.
“It released eye stress because we studied from eight o’clock in the morning until almost noon time,” she said. “It was a break for our eyes to prevent nearsightedness and tired eyes.”
New Vogue Spa’s treatment was supremely relaxing from the onset — part Head Spa, part facial, part eye care. Chen began by massaging my scalp for about 10 minutes, as I tried not to fall asleep.
Next she cleaned my face, applied massage cream and gently massaged my face and eye area, manipulating the outer corners of my eye sockets as well as under my brow bones and on my temples. She was precise and firm but careful — as she pressed on the outside corner of my eye, I felt tension draining down the side of my cheek and neck.
Esthetician Jenny Chen conducts “Golden Eye therapy” on reporter Deborah Vankin.
Xie said the massage is based on traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on stimulating acupressure points around the eyes.
“Gentle massage of these areas is believed to help promote blood circulation, relax the muscles responsible for focusing and relieve visual fatigue,” she said. “While it’s not a medical treatment for vision conditions, it’s widely used as a preventative and restorative method.”
The massage was followed by “Golden Eye therapy,” during which Chen used an electronic device on my face with a metal roller ball on it. It uses “ultrasonic vibration technology,” Xie said, to help the skin absorb the applied moisturizing cream and combat eye puffiness.
The main event was the “cooling steam therapy,” which Xie said was meant to be calming and refreshing and help relieve tired eyes. Chen fitted me with what looked like an enormous diving mask that quickly filled with cool, hydrating mist — I felt droplets of water dripping from my eyes and down my cheeks. The Eye Spa machine uses a “cold mist atomization process,” Xie said, “that disperses micro-particles of moisture combined with soothing essential oils.”
At the end of my treatment, Chen gave me under-eye gel pad masks, for added hydration, while conducting one last head massage. She applied moisturizing eye cream, face cream and sunscreen before sending me off.
Dr. Kristina Voss, an ophthalmologist with Keck Medicine of USC, was enthusiastic about the Eyeball Care treatment.
“It sounds wonderful. Anything that makes you feel good, I generally support,” she said. “It sounds safe because they’re not putting pressure on the eye. Direct pressure on the eyeball [is dangerous]. And I’d be nervous if they were putting something in the eye, but they’re not. Steam, or even cool condensation from a humidifier, is effective for dry eye. Massaging pressure points probably doesn’t treat dry eye, but could potentially treat eyestrain or tension headaches that can be interpreted as eyestrain.”
Los Angeles Times features writer Deborah Vankin inspects her eyeballs after her treatment.
Temporary relief aside, however, Voss warned that the treatment is not a replacement for seeing a doctor if a condition is ongoing.
“It’s relaxing and complementary to a doctor’s dry eye treatments — like medicated drops or in-office treatments — but it’s not a simple fix or cure all,” she said. “Ongoing doctor’s care would be important.”
After my treatment, I was invited to linger in the co-ed Himalayan Salt Room and Red Clay Room or woman-only spa area, complete with a warm soaking tub, lounge area and treatment rooms for body scrubs. (I skipped the adjacent New Vogue MedSpa, where you can get botox, dermal filler or microneedling treatments.)
Guests are also treated to a cup of homemade snow fungus tea (made from tremella mushrooms) with a single jujube, or red, date, floating inside. New Vogue makes a fresh batch every morning for guests, simmering the collagen-rich drink so long it becomes somewhat gelatinous.
2
3
1. The Himalayan Salt Room. 2. The co-ed lounge area. 3. The Red Clay Room.
“Snow fungus focuses on deep hydration and skin plumping, while red dates support circulation and a healthy glow,” Xie said, calling the concoction “a warm bowl of snow fungus and red date soup.”
I can’t speak to the medicinal benefits of snow fungus tea. But after a glass of the warm, woody-tasting drink — together with the hour-long tension-taming eye treatment — I saw the world in a whole new way while walking out the door: clearly, from a relaxed perspective and with the bigger picture in focus.
-
San Diego, CA1 minute agoSan Diego health officials monitor hantavirus situation as cruise ship passengers return to U.S.
-
Milwaukee, WI7 minutes agoSame name keeps coming up in mock drafts as possible Bucks selection
-
Atlanta, GA13 minutes agoFire at Chamblee apartment complex displaces more than 75 residents, closes businesses
-
Minneapolis, MN19 minutes agoMinneapolis grocer charged in $1.1 million SNAP fraud scheme
-
Indianapolis, IN25 minutes agoMartindale-Brightwood neighbors sue to stall Metrobloks data center
-
Pittsburg, PA31 minutes agoDragon softball sweeps Kansas City Piper
-
Augusta, GA37 minutes agoBrent McMillian named as Augusta University’s new Athletics Director – AOL
-
Washington, D.C43 minutes agoNonprofit sues the federal government over plans to paint Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue