Mess Hall

On our lists of the best cocktail bars, activities and arcades & games in New York.

In Harlem, Mess Hall packs mountain-landscape paintings, hunter-green wainscoting, and a mounted taxidermy boar into a narrow room built from flea-market finds. Craft beer runs alongside a bourbon flight served, oddly, in vintage muffin tins, and a house Manhattan variation gets smoked over hickory and studded with house-made beef jerky. Old movies, from Sunset Boulevard to Laurel and Hardy shorts, run silently against one wall while the staff keeps free smoked-salt popcorn coming. The narrow room leaves just enough space for a board game with friends or a shared beer flight with a date.