The Dead Rabbit - Irish Drinks In Financial District

Barmen Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry have come a long way to make you a damn good drink.

Their Atlantic crossing is much the same as that of many before; the particulars are new. These Irishmen left behind family, friends and a "World's Best Cocktail Bar" to open The Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog.

Getting to this drinking saloon and cocktail parlor requires you go downtown. Way downtown.

South even of Wall Street's suits, this bar is like a wormhole to 19th-century Manhattan.

Leave your name at the door for seating at the second-floor cocktail den. While waiting for your table, head to the chummy taproom, with its sawdust-covered floors. Here, frolic with an abyssal whiskey menu, beer, Highballs (all $11), cocktail standards (all $12) and a puff-pastry-swaddled sausage roll ($8).

Upstairs, the menu (see it here) is a leather book loaded with 72 historically accurate cocktails with tongue-tingling names: Bishops, Flips, Possets and Fixes, to name but a few. Each is served in period glassware. A favorite: the mustache cup.

Every drink we imbibed was both stellar and boundary-pushing. Here's an honorable mention to the nightcap that shepherded us sweetly into the cold: The exuberant Pistache Fizz ($14)–a green-tea-infused dry gin concoction of fresh lime juice, pistachio syrup, eucalyptus tincture, double cream and an egg white, fizzed together with carbonic acid.