Best-of list · City Guide
The best cheap bars in New York, from East Village dives to Brooklyn neighborhood spots. Great drinks without a $22 cocktail tax. Our editors pick the.
The short answer
10 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
New York has a $22 cocktail problem. We know it, you know it, and the bars charging it know it too. But the best cheap bars in New York are still out there — 10 of them are on this list. We found them in East Village walk-downs, on forgotten Astoria blocks, and in Crown Heights spaces that could double as someone's very cool living room. None of them cost you the price of a taxi ride just to have a drink.
If you want to go deeper on the no-frills end of this list, our dedicated guide to the best dive bars in New York covers the true institutions — cash-only East Village classics, Bushwick regulars, and the Midtown holdouts that tourists never find. Different standard, same spirit.
Manhattan cheap bars require a little more legwork than Brooklyn, but they exist. The key is to ignore the obvious neighborhoods and focus on blocks that haven't been fully discovered yet. These are our editors' picks on the island.
How we picked
The best cheap bars in New York are not the bars that apologize for being cheap. They are the bars that charge fair prices because that is what their neighborhood demands, their owners believe in, or their concept requires. East Village and Crown Heights are your best bets for reliable value on a weeknight. Queens rewards effort with some of the city's best-priced drinking once you get across the bridge.
Avoid Friday and Saturday if budget is a genuine concern — happy hour pricing disappears and demand pushes service quality down on weekends citywide. Tuesday through Thursday at any of the bars above is the right call. Most of them take no reservations and need none.
James has been drinking his way across New York since 2009. He contributes to several city publications and maintains strong opinions about which East Village block has the best bar-per-dollar ratio in the five boroughs.
Last reviewed 2026-01-14 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.