Clover Club

Dry vermouth back in the glass

Julie Reiner returns dry vermouth to the Clover Club cocktail as bartender at Clover Club in Carroll Gardens, New York City, choosing subtlety over a louder raspberry-gin sour. The house drink carries gin, dry vermouth, lemon, raspberry syrup, and egg white, a pre-Prohibition formula that Reiner has pulled back toward its older proportions rather than treating it as a pink relic. Her path to this bar began in service, with floor work at Parc 55 San Francisco in 1994, then bar work at The Red Room and AsiaSF before New York management at C3 bar in the Washington Square Hotel from 1998. Ownership followed at Flatiron Lounge in 2003, a room that ran until 2018 and gave shape to her modern cocktail vocabulary. At Clover Club, open since 2008, that vocabulary sits at the bar rather than above it: classic structures, market-minded ingredients, repeatable prep, and a room built to make the drink feel neither archival nor softened for fashion.

Raspberry syrup without the cooked note

The raspberry syrup tells much of the method. Reiner recommends muddling fruit with sugar and cold water, letting it steep for 30 minutes, then dissolving with warm water without boiling, so the syrup keeps the snap of the fruit rather than the weight of jam. The egg white gives the Clover Club its froth; the vermouth gives it a quieter middle. House orange bitters draw from Regan's and Fee Brothers, a small bar decision with a large effect on the finish of sours, daisies, juleps, and royales. The menu also makes room for modern house drinks, including Mary Read and Oh Calypso, while the wider program keeps historic forms in service rather than in quotation marks. Cocktail flights, a format Reiner brought forward from Flatiron, let a guest move through unfamiliar families without surrendering the discipline of the pass. The bar has been recognized for high-volume execution, including Tales of the Cocktail's Best High Volume Cocktail Bar in 2013, and for its standing in North America's 50 Best Bars at No. 46 in 2023.

The back bar under low light

The room works in dark wood, close seating, and a back bar that reads as stocked for use rather than display. Vintage glassware from Reiner's collection keeps the drinks in the same register as the room: coupe, stem, fizz, the correct weight in the hand. On Wednesdays, live jazz adds another tempo, but the bar still turns on the ordinary sequence of ice, tins, citrus, syrup, shake, strain. Conversation stays possible. That matters in a room whose confidence depends on cadence as much as recipe, where a flight can cross several families and still land without ceremony. The setting borrows from the idea of a literary club, but the labor belongs to the station. The proof is in the Clover Club cocktail.