Attaboy occupies 134 Eldridge Street, the Lower East Side address where Sasha Petraske opened Milk & Honey on New Year's Eve 1999 and, in doing so, helped launch the modern cocktail movement. There is no menu and no sign. Ring the bell, take a seat, tell the bartender what you feel like, and trust some of the best hands in the business to build it.
We rank Attaboy No. 3 on our guide to the 25 best speakeasies in the world. It is not the most theatrical bar on the list, nor the most awarded, but it may be the most important: this is the room where the template for the modern speakeasy was written, and it still executes that template better than almost anyone.
The most important address in modern bartending
To understand Attaboy you have to understand what came before it. In 1999, Sasha Petraske opened Milk & Honey in this cramped Eldridge Street space as a deliberate rebuke to the loud, bottle-service nightlife of the era: no crowds, no velvet rope, no shouting over music, just impeccable iced drinks in a calm room where reservations were made through a secret phone number that Petraske changed every few months to keep the crowds manageable. Milk & Honey became the quiet epicentre of a global movement, and the bartenders it trained went on to shape cocktail culture on every continent.
Two of those bartenders were Sam Ross, originally from Melbourne, and Michael McIlroy, from Belfast, both hired by Petraske and both, over roughly eight years, entrusted with running the room. When Petraske relocated Milk & Honey uptown in 2012, Ross and McIlroy stayed behind and reopened the original space as Attaboy. Most sources date the handover to 2012, some to 2013; either way, the pair inherited not just a lease but a philosophy, and they have kept it alive ever since. Petraske died in 2015, and Attaboy is widely regarded as the truest living custodian of his legacy.
Sam Ross, Michael McIlroy and the modern canon
What makes Attaboy more than a nostalgia act is the calibre of the people behind the bar. Sam Ross is the creator of the Penicillin, invented at Milk & Honey in 2005, a blended-Scotch drink with a smoky Islay float, honey-ginger syrup and fresh lemon that is now a certified modern classic poured in bars worldwide. He is also the creator of the Paper Plane, the equal-parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon cocktail that became one of the defining drinks of the 2010s. Michael McIlroy's own creations, the whiskey-and-Chartreuse Greenpoint and the Campari-based Rome With a View, are likewise fixtures of the contemporary repertoire.
In other words, when you sit at Attaboy and describe a flavour you are in the mood for, the drink that comes back may well be built on classical specifications by the very people who wrote them. That is a rare thing, and it is the heart of the bar's appeal: bespoke drinking of the highest order, delivered without ceremony.
No menu, no sign: how Attaboy works
Attaboy has no printed list. The format is dealer's choice, or bartender's choice: you offer a spirit, a mood or a direction, spirit-forward, citrusy, smoky, refreshing, and the bartender improvises a drink to suit. This is inherited directly from Milk & Honey, and it demands enormous range and confidence from the staff, which is exactly why it works here and falls flat in lesser imitators.
From the street there is almost nothing to see: an unmarked industrial door, historically fitted with a buzzer, today marked only by a small illuminated "A" glowing behind what looks like a faux tailor's-shop window. You ring and wait to be admitted into a tiny room, roughly twenty-five to thirty seats, with a tin ceiling, bare brick and vintage back-bar relics that have barely changed since the Milk & Honey days. It is intimate to the point of snug; when it is full, which is most nights after eight, thirty is a crowd.
The reservation story has evolved. Milk & Honey was reservations-only via its secret number; early Attaboy flipped that to walk-in only, no bookings, in the spirit of a proper neighbourhood bar. Today the bar operates a hybrid: a limited number of reservations via OpenTable, with everyone else seated first-come, first-served, for parties of six or fewer, over-21s only with physical ID. It is open seven days a week, into the small hours. A well-worn piece of regular's advice still holds: for the best odds of a seat, go right at opening or go very late.
The Milk & Honey house style
Attaboy's drinks are built on a specific, exacting philosophy that Petraske drilled into a generation of bartenders: a few good ingredients, fresh-squeezed juice, quality spirits, and everything chilled as thoroughly as possible. The hallmarks are hand-cut ice, careful attention to dilution and aeration, jiggered measurements built to precise tension, chilled glassware, and drinks constructed by the round for speed and consistency. It is craft in the truest sense, invisible technique in service of a balanced glass.
There are inherited quirks, too. Like Milk & Honey, Attaboy famously does not serve vodka, a small statement of intent about the kind of drinking it is interested in. And while Ross and McIlroy kept the room and the ethos, they deliberately lightened the mood, shedding Milk & Honey's suspenders-and-bow-ties formality for something warmer and more relaxed. The old bar's elaborate house rules gave way to a simpler idea: take the drinks seriously, never yourself. As the bar's own people put it, the focus is always the drinks, the service and the vibe, never the bartender.
What to drink
Because there is no menu, the honest answer to "what should I order" is: tell them the truth about what you like, and let them work. Start with a genuine preference rather than a remembered classic; the bartenders do their best work off a feeling, not a spec sheet. That said, the drinks most associated with the room, the Penicillin, the Paper Plane, the Greenpoint, are all born of this lineage, and asking for one, or for a riff on one, is a fine way in.
The drinks land at premium New York cocktail prices, in line with the neighbourhood's printed-menu rooms, and they arrive quickly for handmade work. This is not a laboratory bar of 48-hour clarifications; it is a bar of flawless classic technique executed at speed, and that immediacy is part of its charm. Pair a visit with Little Branch or another of the city's Petraske-lineage rooms for a proper tour of where modern American cocktails were forged.
Recognition
Attaboy's influence has been formally recognised. In 2022 it was named the No. 1 bar in North America on the inaugural North America's 50 Best Bars list, and it has remained a fixture of the 50 Best universe since, sitting at No. 37 in North America in 2026 and appearing on the extended World's 50 Best list. But the accolades almost undersell the point. Attaboy's real distinction is lineage and consistency: it is the physical home of Milk & Honey, the origin point of multiple modern-classic cocktails, and a bar that former staff credit with fundamentally changing how the world thinks about a drink.
The Milk & Honey diaspora
To sit at Attaboy is to sit at the source of a river that now runs through the whole cocktail world. The bartenders Sasha Petraske trained in this room, and the ideas he codified here, fresh juice, precise dilution, hand-cut ice, a calm and civilised room, spread outward as his protégés opened and staffed bars across New York, London, Melbourne and beyond. Former colleagues have credited the Milk & Honey school with fundamentally changing global cocktail culture, shifting bartending from showmanship toward craft, and Attaboy is the physical place where that shift began and where it is still practised daily.
The proof is in the drinks that left this address and became standards. The Penicillin and the Paper Plane are now poured in bars on every continent, so ubiquitous that many drinkers never learn they were born on Eldridge Street. That quiet, uncredited influence is very much in the spirit of the place: Attaboy has never been interested in taking a bow. It simply keeps making excellent drinks in the room where modern bartending was, in a real sense, invented, and lets the rest of the world catch up in its own time.
The verdict
Attaboy is the everyman's great cocktail bar, hidden in plain sight behind an unmarked door. It has no list to deliberate over, no spectacle to photograph, and no interest in reminding you how important it is. What it offers instead is the most reliable bespoke drinking in America, made by people who helped write the modern canon, in the room where that canon began. For influence, for consistency, and for sheer quality of liquid, it earns its place near the very top of our list. If you want to understand the modern speakeasy, this is where you start.
See the full field in our 25 best speakeasies in the world, or keep exploring in our New York guide.