Botanica Bar

Houston Street runs mostly to polished cocktail bars, but this one goes the other way: grungy booths, mismatched chairs, and a room that gets almost no daylight. A back alcove is where groups tend to end up. Happy hour runs until 8pm daily with cut-rate wine and well drinks, and even the house cocktails, like a ginger-and-rosemary Ginger Yum-Yum, stay cheap by SoHo standards. It's the kind of bar people bring coworkers to when the plan is simply to drink.