How do you get into Banzarbar?
Banzarbar is listed as inside another business. Walk through a working business to reach the bar.
The venue’s own site places the entrance at Freemans restaurant, so we repeat it here. We publish the kind of door a bar has, not step-by-step directions through it.
Reservations are taken through Resy. Booking ahead is the surest way in.
What “inside another business” means in practice
A bar reached through a working business is the arrangement Prohibition actually produced. A shopfront that stood up to a glance from the street was the point, and the trade carried on behind it. The modern version keeps the structure and drops the risk: the front is a real business with real customers, and the door at the back is not hidden from anyone who asks. The practical consequence is that the front business’s hours can govern your access, not the bar’s.
The drinks at Banzarbar
How the venue describes itself: “Banzarbar is a secret speakeasy cocktail bar upstairs at Freemans Restaurant in Lower East Side of New York City.” (from its own website, retrieved 9 October 2026)
The current drinks list is published on the venue’s own site — see the menu.
Beyond what the venue publishes we have not verified a list, so what follows is the period rather than the bar: Blood and Sand, Bobby Burns, and Rob Roy are all drinks of this era, and each links to its origin and its build.
Where Banzarbar sits
Banzarbar is in New York, New York, in the county of the same name, in the Mid-Atlantic of the United States.
Our directory currently lists 66 speakeasies and hidden bars in New York. The full list is on our guide to hidden bars in New York.
Measured from the map pins, the closest of those to Banzarbar are Fig. 19, about 300 m away, Ye’s Apothecary, about 350 m away, and Midnight Plus One, about 400 m away.
New York holds 101 listed venues in this directory. See them all on our New York speakeasy guide.
Prohibition in New York
New York came under national prohibition on 17 January 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment took effect and the Volstead Act defined an intoxicating beverage as anything above one half of one per cent alcohol — a threshold strict enough to close breweries that had expected to survive.
More on the period in our history of Prohibition in New York.
What the newspapers recorded in New York
Searching the Library of Congress run of New York newspapers for speakeasy, blind pig and bootlegger across 1920 to 1933 returns dated pages anyone can open. These are from New York:
- The daily worker, December 15, 1931 — read the page at the Library of Congress
- The daily worker, July 14, 1927 — read the page at the Library of Congress
- The daily worker, August 5, 1927 — read the page at the Library of Congress
- The daily worker, October 16, 1930 — read the page at the Library of Congress
Planning a visit
Hours published by the venue:
- Monday to Thursday, 6pm to midnight
- Friday to Saturday, 6pm to 2am
- Sunday, 6pm to midnight
Hours as published on the venue’s own site, retrieved 9 October 2026.
You can reach Banzarbar by phone on (212) 420-0012, through its own website, and on Facebook and Instagram.
The address is 2 Freeman Alley, New York, NY 10002. Open in Google Maps.
What we have confirmed
For Banzarbar we hold street address, telephone number, official website, social accounts, opening hours, a published drinks list, and an online booking link. We do not yet hold a listed-building record.
It is in the directory because the description in the source data describes it as entered through another business.
Two independent open datasets, OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, both carry this venue at this location. Agreement between them is the strongest existence check we can make without visiting.
The source data classifies the premises as a bar.