212 Hisae’s is a staple of downtown Manhattan’s college nightlife for one reason. Ask those waiting an hour to get a table – longer on weekends – and they’ll shout it loud enough to wake up the whole block. $3 shots!
The East Village pub doesn’t shy away from its reputation of being the best place to pre-game outside of an NYU dorm. Freshmen and sophomores come here to test their fake IDs and binge drink as many $6 cocktails as they can in 90 minutes–a time limit that pre-dates recent COVID rules. I know this for a fact; I was one of them.
For the three years I’ve been using my fake, 212 is the only bar I always knew would accept it. A week before my 21st birthday, I revisited the place.
The crinkled wet-then-dried paper menu, like everything else at 212, is oddly mismatched. Apparently, serving “Asian fusion tapas” means listing spring rolls next to Caesar salad. My party opted for the “Asian” part of the menu, ordering kimchi fried rice and dumplings. Both dishes were greasy and satisfying. The sampling of American bar classics and Asian takeaway appetizers are comforting because they resemble their frozen, buy-in-bulk counterparts.
The “big plate” entrees – a halfhearted attempt at full meals – betray the tenets of the restaurant: they are neither cheap nor edible. The chicken teriyaki, chicken Marsala and Korean beef all follow a suspicious formula of slathering viscous brown sauce on a protein. Big plates come with a sad salad and hard, crusty rice. The $12 we spent per entree would go much further on St. Marks Place, one block south.
Clearly, customers come here for the drinks, not the food.
The drink menu is both exhaustive and ambiguous. Budget cocktails at $5 apiece are lumped in one bucket, $6 cocktails in another. All this in a cumbersome, comma-separated list with no need for ingredients or line breaks. The kitchen assumes, correctly, that their patrons don’t care about what goes in a drink as long as it gets them buzzed. Many names are recognizable – screwdriver, margarita, mojito – others obscure mystery mixes that come in fluorescent blues, greens, and yellows.
My party ordered a Long Island iced tea, a “mellon” ball, and a zombie. They are better identified by their colors because, save for hue, all three drinks looked exactly the same. No garnish, in a plastic cup, with ice and foam like it was just dispensed from a soda fountain.
The syrupy sweetness left a sticky feeling in the back of my throat, distracting from the taste of substandard booze. Though cheap, the drinks are strong. Two cocktails had me clutching the handrail to visit the basement bathroom, wondering exactly how many drinks I’d had.
It was enough to make me stop processing the random, unpredictable playlist. The switch from country music to The Weeknd, from Madonna to Maroon 5, nearly gave me whiplash. I tuned back in when the iCarly theme song came on.
Everyone in the bar dated themselves by singing along verbatim, too drunk to remember that their IDs show a ’90s birthday. When our server chatted with my table, he asked if we were first- or second-years. “You’d be surprised how many people fall for that,” he said, smirking. I realized, then, that I had outgrown the bar.
Despite everything, the bar is still standing because it is honest about what it is. You can find low-quality food and drink anywhere in the city, but 212 Hisae’s has the prices to match. In a broad field of $16 cocktails, 212 has carved out a grateful niche. Plus, it’s a short walk from NYU and Cooper Union, a perfect distance for students to sober up just enough to get past their dorm’s security officers, go upstairs, and fall asleep rocked by the city’s exhilarating spin.
