Best-of list · City Guide
The best outdoor bars in New York for summer — from Brooklyn waterfront terraces to Lower East Side garden bars. Our editors rank the top al fresco spots.
The short answer
9 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
New York's outdoor bar scene in summer is one of the city's most reliable pleasures — and also one of its most crowded categories. The outdoor bars new york summer visitors ask about are rarely the ones worth the effort. The ones worth going to tend to be smaller, less obvious, and better thought through: a garden off a side street in Carroll Gardens, a waterfront terrace in DUMBO that most tourists walk past, or a backyard situation in the East Village that has been running quietly for a decade. These are the ones we keep going back to.
Brooklyn has the best outdoor bar density in the five boroughs. The combination of townhouse backyards, converted lots, and waterfront access along the East River gives it an infrastructure that Manhattan, with its limited land and premium on square footage, simply cannot match.
How we picked
The most underrated outdoor bar recommendation in New York: LIC Landing on a clear July evening, arriving around 7pm with a view of the sunset hitting the Midtown skyline. It is accessible, affordable, and more beautiful than most of what you will pay significantly more for on the Manhattan side. For the best cocktail quality in an outdoor setting, Employees Only's garden and Dutch Kills in Long Island City both deliver drinks programmes strong enough to be worth visiting in their own right. And for the most purely New York summer outdoor bar experience, the Frying Pan on the Hudson on a Tuesday at 6pm — the city, the river, a cold beer — is hard to argue with.
James covers the US bar scene for barsforKings and has a particular fondness for outdoor beer gardens and waterfront dives that no one on the internet has written about yet. He has been drinking in New York since before the cocktail renaissance.
Last reviewed 2026-05-27 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.