Beer Gardens Bloom Around New York City

ROBERT SIMONSON The New York Times 08/10/2010 14:00

Lara Pasternak sells tickets for beer and pretzels at the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten.

THERE is no drinking forum more compatible with summer than the beer garden. Until recently, New Yorkers wanting to raise a stein in dappled sunshine had one choice: Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, which turns 100 this year. But in the last year or so, beer gardens have sprouted across the city.

This wave coincided roughly with the outbreak of modern speakeasies. Both of them appeal to a populace seeking authentic, backward-glancing drinking traditions. Otherwise the two trends couldn’t be more different. Speakeasies, small, dark coves hidden behind nameless doors, tell of exclusivity, while beer gardens are proudly populist bastions of communal seating. And with wallets being battered daily, ease of entry and easily met tabs give beer gardens the edge among the thirsty.

The most unlikely of the city’s new open-air taverns is the Biergarten at the Standard Hotel, 848 Washington Street (Little West 12th Street), (212) 645-4646, standardhotels.com/new-york-city/bars/biergarten. This must surely be the most democratic scene in the socially ruthless meatpacking district, a come-one-come-all antidote to this chi-chi hotel’s hard-to-penetrate penthouse aerie that’s called the Boom Boom Room.

A chunk of the High Line acts as a ceiling, and the atmosphere is cacophonous but friendly, with elements of the frat house, thanks to two purple table-tennis tables (people use them even when they’re littered with majestically tall beer glasses), as well as the fairground, owing to a ticket booth at the entrance where you buy $8 stubs, one for each draft beer or food item. And there’s this touch: the waitresses wear T-shirts silk-screened to look like St. Pauli Girl-style dirndls.