Tigre

Ratios before decoration

A martini is set by ratio before it is dressed. At Tigre in Manhattan, Joshua Boissy works as co-founder and CEO, and Krystof Zizka shapes the beverage program as chef. Joshua Boissy came to the Lower East Side room in 2022 after building Maison Premiere as co-founder and owner in 2011, then widening that work through Premiere Enterprises in 2018. His role at Tigre keeps creation, business control, and daily responsibility close to the same hand. Krystof Zizka brings a related discipline from Maison Premiere, where wine and oysters sit at the center of the house and service depends on pacing, pairing, and sequence. Tigre does not treat the bar as a separate lane from the room. The list, the glassware, the small plates, the door, and the pace all belong to one method. Boissy has described the atmosphere as a nod to the residential sexiness of New York in the 1970s, ’80s, and maybe even the ’90s. The phrase matters because it gives the place a working reference: not nostalgia as ornament, but a room built around low light, close seating, and the sense that a drink has to land in its setting.

A freezer bank and a chosen line

The program is clearest in the martinis by ratio. Instead of treating the drink as a fixed house declaration, Tigre lets the guest choose the line between spirit and vermouth, then backs that choice with freezer-banked gins and vodkas. The technique is cold, direct, and unforgiving. A martini has little cover for a tired bottle, a warm glass, or a garnish used as apology. The Cigarette Martini has carried the most public attention, including notice from Esquire and New York magazine, but the structure around it matters more than the fame of a single glass. The menu moves through categories named Then, Now, Coolers, and Mists, with wine, beer, sake, and non-alcoholic drinks held inside the same bar voice. Food stays in the register of a cocktail room rather than a full dining-room argument: marcona almonds, arbequina olives, East Coast oysters, shrimp cocktail, tuna tartare, royal ossetra caviar, and wagyu skewers. Each plate works at the edge of salt, fat, chill, and texture, the old grammar of drinking food handled with a sharper pass.

The room behind the worn door

The entrance on Rivington Street keeps its graffiti-worn face, a plain refusal to announce what sits beyond it. Inside, Studio Tre’s design tightens the field: golden mirrors, dark oak paneling, gold ultrasuede walls, polished steel, jacquard velvet banquettes with tiger embroidery, and a mirrored ceiling that breaks the room into fragments. The back bar does not feel like display for its own sake. It reads as a working wall, built for reach, repetition, and the small choreography of service when the room fills. Music comes through retro Devon Ojas speakers, loud enough to give the bar its pulse without turning the drink into a prop. The counter, the booths, and the passage from door to seat all keep pressure on timing. A cold glass arrives at the point where the room has already done some of the work.

Recognition kept in proportion

Tigre received a Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award mention among Best Bars In America in 2024, and Esquire named it Best Club/Night Venue Design in 2024. Those notices sit beside the daily discipline rather than above it. Boissy and Zizka’s shared strength is the ability to make a room feel composed without sanding off its edge. The object in hand is the Tigre Cigarette Martini, cold from the freezer bank, made to the ratio the guest chose.