Painkiller opened on Essex Street on the Lower East Side in May 2010, marked by a turquoise spray-painted door that became its calling card. Giuseppe Gonzalez and Richard Boccato built it as a serious tiki bar at a moment when craft tiki had nearly vanished from New York.
The bar treated tiki as a cocktail discipline rather than a kitsch joke. That stance mattered. Painkiller is widely credited, alongside a small handful of rooms, with restarting the city's modern tiki conversation, and it drew steady attention from the cocktail press during its short run.
The room merged tiki's romanticised South Seas imagery with the owners' nostalgia for the grit of 1970s Lower East Side. It read as deliberately rough rather than polished, a tiki bar that knew exactly where it stood in the city.
Foursquare tips and The Tiki Chick's write-up describe a dim, packed space where the drinks did the talking. Capacity was tight, and it filled fast on weekends.
The drinks were the reason to go. Tiki cocktails arrived in proper tiki mugs, and the pina colada came served in a frozen pineapple, a presentation that regulars still bring up. The rum focus was real, and the builds were precise.
The namesake Painkiller is what eventually forced the rename. After a trademark dispute with Pusser's Rum, which owns the Painkiller name, the bar became PKNY. It closed in 2013, not long after.
The crowd skewed cocktail-literate, a mix of industry regulars and Lower East Side night-crawlers who came for the rum program. It ran late and loud.
Tiki fans treated it as a pilgrimage stop while it lasted. The 2021 PKNY reunion in Greenpoint, run with original owner Richard Boccato, showed how much goodwill the name still carried years after closing.