Summer 2024 Featured Bar: Sip & Guzzle, NYC

For 41 years, 29 Cornelia Street in New York’s West Village housed the Cornelia Street Cafe, and now is home to one of New York’s hottest new bars, Sip & Guzzle. It’s an incredible two-level cocktail bar which industry veterans Steve Schneider (who graces the cover of this issue) and Shingo Gokan opened in January this year to offer guests an immersive “sip” and “guzzle” experience. The top floor, Guzzle, is run by Steve, while the bottom level, Sip, is overseen by Shingo. Both are longtime friends and partners who understand each other’s styles and operate another bar together in Shanghai called The Odd Couple, which has been open for almost six years.

Explaining the concept, Steve says both of the bars, Sip and Guzzle, work in tandem. “Sip & Guzzle, it’s not about the Guzzle bar or the Sip bar. It’s about the full experience. And I think our guests, when they get a chance to experience the whole thing, I think they get the most out of it.”

Guzzle, where Steve spends his time, is exactly the style of bar in which Steve likes to drink.

“I like to drink classics and flavors that you crave, like strawberries, peaches, pecans. And Japanese flavors like yuzu and lychee. Things that people know, and drinks you already love, but with different twists on them,” he says.

The cocktails at Guzzle are “clean, cold, prepared quickly and well executed,” says Steve. They’re twists on a classic and each has a story. Steve likes to call the cocktails “comfort classics” like the one we chatted over during a recent visit with Steve, called the “Miami Vice Negroni.” The cocktails at Sip & Guzzle were all created in partnership with members of the bar team, and in the case of this drink Steve says he had originally set out to make a strawberry Negroni, but Ben Yabrow, the head bartender at Sip suggested to rinse it in coconut oil and make it a “Miami Vice” version. So that’s what they did, and the result is nothing short of incredible. To prepare it, they start by making a traditional Negroni. Then, Steve says, “we cook it in a sous vide for a few hours with strawberries. And then once it’s cooked, we put coconut oil in it, and we freeze it overnight, and skim off the fat.” The cocktail is served beautifully, yet so simplistic in a rocks glass with a large cube that has a strawberry stamp on it. They also feature a Margarita variation that’s made with Yuzu and Shiso. Other cocktails include a lychee Martini and a cold brew Martini, just to name a few.

THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING UPSTAIRS AT GUZZLE. NOW LET’S GO DOWN TO SIP…

“You go downstairs and it’s really sexy and beautiful and it’s a really cool room. It’s sit-down only, it’s intimate. And all the drinks down there take days to prepare ahead of time. You know, lab-driven drinks, adventurous cocktails,” Steve says about Sip’s amazing modern mixology experience.

Sip & Guzzle is everything a bar should be, and that starts with the people at the top, Steve and Shingo.