Bar Etienne soft-opened on Bedford Street on 30 July 2026 as the first collaboration between Michael Bray and Keith Larry. The two had known one another for more than twenty years through New York’s music, restaurant and nightlife worlds before opening the bar in the former Bandits space. The Bedford Street frontage is restrained: brick, a direct entrance and a pavement table marking the bar’s compact scale. It reads as part of the street rather than as a destination set apart from it, which suits a project conceived around the familiarity of a neighbourhood bar. Larry spent more than a decade at Employees Only and leads the cocktail programme. The founders describe the project through two familiar forms, the Parisian bistro and the New York neighbourhood bar, with cocktails and French-influenced food sharing the same compact West Village address. The cocktail programme provides one centre of gravity, while French-influenced food and the bistro reference keep the project broader than a drinks-only address. Its identity lies in the overlap of those two traditions: a compact West Village bar that aims for familiarity without giving up a clear point of view.
West Village, New York, United States