The 25 Douchiest Bars in NYC

NYC drinking establishments where the douche prevails.

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McFadden's

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25. McFadden's

Neighborhood: Midtown East
Address800 2nd Ave.
Websitemcfaddens42.com

Irish men the world over cringe at the sheer number of bros that lie in wait behind the doors of this McBar. Bros of every kind can be found here: bros "courting" girls that have taken too much advantage of the "ladies drink free" Jägerbomb special, bros chest bumping with little-to-no irony, bros unabashedly singing Bon Jovi lyrics to each another, and especially bros coining new permutations of the word "bro" just for fun (they work at Wells Fargbro, for example).

Libation

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24. Libation

Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Address:
 137 Ludlow St.
Website:
 libationnyc.com

What happens when a Meatpacking District-type venue attempts to cash in on the cool factor of the Lower East Side? You get Libation, a sady out-of-place bar, one that draws a socially clueless MPD crowd to one of the last undouchified neighborhoods standing.

Why are meatheads and newly-minted legal girls flocking to Libation’s outdated (but not in a purposefully retro way) digs, complete with yellow and orange glowing waterfall? Because they don’t know any better. If they did, they would not be singing along to Lil Jon and LMFAO when there are dozens of bars twice as legit just blocks away. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t go here.

The Stumble Inn

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23. The Stumble Inn

Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Address
1454 2nd Ave. 
Website
nycbestbar.com/stumble

Rolling up to the Stumble Inn, you're regularly met by a huddle of wobbly girls flirting with the bouncer and bumming cigarettes. And while this doesn't have to be a bad thing, it becomes a bona fide omen once you get inside.

Inside, you're met by more girls, many of whom who have put on their Sunday best—Delta Gamma gear and a generous layer of lipgloss—who are shamelessly grinding to Madonna's "Like a Prayer" on the kind of guys who find that hot. You may get vomited on, you may get laid. It's a fifty-fifty shot, not unlike the one Steve Carell's character took with a french toast loving drunk in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. We hope you have better luck than him.

3 Sheets Saloon

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22. Three Sheets Saloon

NeighborhoodGreenwich Village
Address:
 134 West 3rd St.
Website
nycbestbar.com/3SheetsSaloon

Very few bars unapologetically serve vodka and blue Gatorade drink specials. But Three Sheets has no concern for things like image. For the same reason, it can also offer you $1 beers and a game of beer pong. What it can't offer you is a promise that you will ever win. Beer pong is hard when the cups are glued to the table with the last player's Miller Light, and especially difficult when you're playing against bros who do this every night. Which ironically, is exactly why Three Sheets is on this list.

Also, in beer pong everyone loses.

Coyote Ugly

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21. Coyote Ugly

Neighborhood: East Village
Address
153 1st Ave. # A
Website
coyoteuglysaloon.com

Doing shots out of the bottle is inherently douchey. But add to that crowds of touristy dudes who came to take those shots because it involves flirtatious cowgirl bartenders who have just performed a second-rate dance routine on the bar because he saw it in a movie once, and you've got a bar so douchey we're embarrassed to even know it exists, let alone be writing about it. We hate this.

Brother Jimmy's Barbeque

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20. Brother Jimmy's

Neighborhood: Murray Hill
Address:
181 Lexington Ave
Website
brotherjimmys.com

Every one of Brother Jimmy’s locations is a drunken shitshow. There’s really no other way to put it. And when your motto is, “Put some south in yo’ mouth,” and you serve fishbowls full of who-the-hell-knows-what, we don’t feel bad saying so.

But it’s not even encouraging binge drinking that makes your bar douchey, it’s the type of person who frequents your Midtown location, who chooses to slurp on swamp water to unwind after work at some finance gig while waiting for the train to Hoboken, and then gets belligerent and tries to kick it to girls. All the while at a bar that's inside a restaurant, holding a fishbowl, BBQ sauce on his tie because he didn’t even do the tuck-in-trick. Oh, for shame.

The Ainsworth

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19. The Ainsworth

Neighborhood: Chelsea
Address: 122 West 26th St.
Websiteainsworthnyc.com

Sporty and classy are pretty far apart on the descriptive spectrum. Why then, Ainsworth, would you try to combine the two to create this sad, sad establishment: the upscale sports bar?

The convergence of chandeliers and plasma screens draws a crowd of young professionals who have convinced themselves their days of douchebaggery are behind them. They're wrong. It's still there, lurking underneath the ill-fitting suits, just like the Ainsworth's sports bar heart is somewhere underneath all of that fancy exposed wood. Stop fronting.

The 13th Step

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18. The 13th Step

Neighborhood: East Village
Address: 149 2nd Ave.
Website: nycbestbars.com

This frat-centric basement bar is damp with shame and sticky with discarded Natty Light. It's also stuffed with bridge-and-tunnel folk who all derive comfort from the vintage photos of the NYC skyline plastering the walls. They are slamming their glasses togethers, toasting to having escaped the suburbs of Jersey and Long Island, even if only for a few hours. After one too many games of Beirut (that's what classy frat boys call beer pong), the photos will also serve as a reminder of their locale when their internal GPS draws a blank. 

The 12th step is the mark of an alcoholic who has overcome addiction. The 13th step is for frat boys who wear alcoholism like a Boy Scout badge, utterly resigned to their douchey lot in life. Or, who after one too many games of beer pong, can no longer count.

The Hudson Bar

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17. The Hudson Bar

Neighborhood: Hell's Kitchen
Address: 356 West 58th St.
Website: hudsonhotel.com

The Hudson Bar is the neon-soaked douche epicenter of NYC, thanks to gaudy glowing floors and a seemingly schizophrenic doorman who arbitrarily allows select weirdos entrance, setting the stage for wild card nights.

The crowd is a mixed bag of douche: there's the rich and sleazy out-of-towner kicking it to women half his age; the pretentious young dude who is deathly serious dressed in blue crushed velvet and over-sized top hat; and the middle-aged, socially-awkward guy who has clearly paid for the woman sipping a $20 glass of champagne on his arm. The hookers are flawless at the Hudson, hookers you could never afford. Which of course, makes the whole business that much douchier.

 

Sutton Place

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16. Sutton Place

Neighborhood: Midtown East
Address: 1015 2nd Ave.
Website: suttonplacenyc.com

Sutton Place could have been a conveniently located bar for rooftop rabble-rousing, but its first-rate views of the city are diminished by the second-rate Midtown financiers who mob the place the second they get off the clock, and are subsequently trashed by the time the normal nighttime crowd rolls in. Whoa, what time did your party start dude? Glancing at his attire, a white, now Bud-stained button-up and an unfastened tie limp around his neck, probably somewhere around 6 p.m.

Bar None

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15. Bar None

Neighborhood: East Village
Address98 3rd Ave.
Website: barnonenyc.com

Bar None is the kind of place where a frat dude who spent the night with the bros playing beer pong and pool makes a last ditch effort to pick up the ladies waiting for the bathroom. And, because she’s on her third fishbowl of the evening, she actually acquiesces. These kind of scenarios sometimes occur in dive bars, but Bar None stands out as douchey because said dude actually believes this is appropriate behavior. His dive equivalent is just too drunk to know the difference.

The Gin Mill

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14. The Gin Mill

NeighborhoodUpper West Side
Address
442 Amsterdam Ave.
Website
nycbestbar.com/ginmill

This is the rare place where the girls are just as douchey as the guys. Which might be because the Gin Mill baits fratty clientele with college themed nights where their ID can score them half off already cheap drinks, but we can’t say for sure. We can, however, say this: the odds of either getting into a fight because someone hits on your girl, or because somebody’s girl hits on you, are pretty damn high here. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Gansevoort Park Avenue Hotel

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13. Gansevoort Park Avenue Hotel

Neighborhood: Midtown East
Address: 420 Park Ave.
Website: gansevoortpark.com

It's safe to say that any hotel that gets the unfortunate label of being "trendy" will be as heavy on the the disappointment as it is on the douchiness, and Gansevoort's "swank" rooftop bar predictably delivers just that. In addition to the Euro-trash and Oopma-Loompa-shaded Jersey Girls that occupy Gansevoort's Meatpacking location, the Park Avenue offshoot also includes entitled businessmen and bridge-and-tunnel bros looking to unwind in all the wrong ways. 

And by the wrong way, we mean ordering a $400 bottle of champagne (split between 20 friends: "We can all have a sip, guys!"), waving the bottle in the air while dancing in an attempt to impress the throngs of purposely aloof women—never a good look. Also not a good look: wearing sunglasses at night, with no apparent understanding of Corey Hart. 

The Mean Fiddler

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12. The Mean Fiddler

NeighborhoodMidtown West
Address
266 West 47th St.
Website:
 themeanfiddlernyc.com

The Mean Fiddler is only blocks away from Times Square but it’s not the tourists we fear—it’s the service industry. They've claimed the Fiddler as their unofficial gathering spot, a haven for everyone coming off 12-hour-long shifts in Hell’s Kitchen's restaurants, finding lost luster in in Red Bull and vodkas. Ironically, the Fiddler's wall is adorned with Oscar Wilde’s famed aphorism: "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." We beg to differ. At the Fiddler, the working class is a curse to those drinking.

Ava Lounge

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11. Ava Lounge

Neighborhood: Midtown West
Address
210 West 55th St.
Website
avaloungenyc.com

Frat douches we can kind of relate to. Because we were kind of like them once. Only, you know, when it was appropriate, i.e. when still enrolled as an undergrad. But the douches here are a foreign breed. They ruin the Dream Hotel's beautiful rooftop lounge. It's like discovering that a beautiful woman has a pancake ass.

At the Ava Lounge even the bird's eye view of Central Park doesn't distract from the wanna-be ballers clumsily thumping alongside Euro-trash to the house remix of "Total Eclipse of the Heart," while using their bottle to bait to every available woman in their Blackberry. Did we just wander into a douche-warp? Yes. Yes, we did.

 

Professor Thom's

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10. Professor Thom's

Neighborhood: East Village
Address219 2nd Ave.
Websiteprofessorthoms.com

Sometimes a bar hits you over the head with its douchiness. Professor Thom's isn't one of those places. The UMass hordes that congregate here seem congenial enough at first. But then you slowly put the perpetual Sam Adams specials and the dude ice grilling your Yankees hat together. You're in a Boston bar, and these people you formerly considered your new drinking buddies are actually Sox fans! Abort mission—we repeat, abort mission!

Brass Monkey

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9. Brass Monkey

Neighborhood: Meatpacking District
Address55 Little West 12th St.
Websitebrassmonkeynyc.com

Meatpacking rejects, the guys who are were denied entrance into one of the area's more upscale clubs like Le Bain or 1Oak, end up at Brass Monkey, which explains the high concentration of douche. Take a bruised-ego guido who still has some unfinished creepin' to do and put him in a bar with dozens of others just like him. Have them compete over a limited number of women. What do you get? A perfect storm of douche that results in dozens of bar fights. Dozens.

Turtle Bay

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8. Turtle Bay

Neighborhood: Midtown East
Address: 987 2nd Ave.
Website: turtlebaynyc.com

Walking into this joint is akin to committing character suicide. Why? Because being in a room so dense with douchiness, some of it is bound to rub off on you.

The only reasonable excuse for taking this risk? The high likelihood of getting laid, which is pretty high thanks to a staggering number of over-served women who place little stock in self-respect and, by the looks of the pace of their Jack Daniel's consumption, have chosen Ke$ha as their role model. Unfortunately, there is also a corresponding number of fresh-off-the-clock businessmen desperately working that, “I’m going to kick it to you even though you're visibly intoxicated and I'm married" angle.

The Gaslight

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7. The Gaslight

Neighborhood: West Village/Meatpacking District
Address: 400 West 14th St.
Website: gaslightnyc.com

The Gaslight skirts the edge of the Meatpacking District, and the bro overflow is savage. The Gaslight's quaint mix of antique store/coffee shop decor caters to a West Village crowd, but is confusingly incongruent with the bodies imbibing here, offending characters that include B&T types and/or the type of dudes who consider Usher "real hip-hop."

Even if Usher is your thing and you're in the mood to be a "dirty, dirty dancer," your occupied elbow room impedes the busting of any real moves. Combine that with potent $16 cocktails and men who wear their heterosexuality like outdated tribal ink, and you have a heady mix of douche-fueled aggression. Cue the "accidental" shoving.

Dorrian's Red Hand

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6. Dorrian's Red Hand

Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Address: 1616 2nd Ave.
Website: dorrians.com

Dorrian's has a long history of douchebaggery, so long in fact, that some call it an institution. But really, people have to stop using that term so loosely. 

The regulars at Dorrian's are primarily made up of two things: yuppies and the women who love them. Something about Dorrian's seems to awaken the sleeping beast in white boys, which results in the saddest sight drunken eyes can ever see: these white boys dancing.

There are is nothing more douchey, or more abjectly terrifying, than a white boy doing the robot to the latest Black Eyed Peas song.

 

Tonic East

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5. Tonic East

Neighborhood: Murray Hill
Address411 3rd Ave.
Websitetoniceast.com

Tonic is the type of place you go to where you encounter three floors of guys wearing khakis, dancing to Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot," and totally feeling themselves, the type of dudes who are ordinarily harmless, but after a few gin and tonics clearly don’t know how to handle their damn selves. And by that, we mean kicking game that even sorority chicks aren't with, overusing the word "epic," and high-fiving with no regard for what's decent.

Wicked Willy's

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4. Wicked Willy's

Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
Address: 149 Bleecker St.
Website: wickedwillys.com

Wicked Willy’s is a frat boy’s wet dream; each room of the bar is devoted to a different douche-specific desire. In the main room there's a bar where you can get Miller Light for a dollar, and where two types of entertainment are simultaneously available: karaoke courtesy of tipsy, tone-deaf women and on better (or worse?) nights, a stripper pole for aspiring exotic dancers.

If you tire of watching boozed-up, uncoordinated women acquire bruises, you can always head to the beer pong table in the back room. Did we mention that this is all occurs under a ceiling heavily draped in pirate decorations? We can't explain.

Johnny Utah's

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3. Johnny Utah’s

Neighborhood: Midtown West
Address: 25 West 51st St.
Website: johnnyutahs.com

Johnny Utah's is a place where yuppies go to make bad decisions, bad decisions outside the realm of “I think I’ll wear another striped shirt today.” The bar provides the fuel to make such mistakes: $3 dollar beer cans, $4 SoCo Lime Shots, and $6 mixed drinks.

Once alive with cheap booze, young ("It's my first job; I get to wear my dad's suit now!") professionals crowd around a fenced-in mechanical bull, hoping to catch a glimpse of a sorority-girl-turned-socialite who is intoxicated enough to think that bra-only bull riding is best. We're not saying you don't want to see such a thing, but we are saying you don't want to drink with other men who do, to a washed-up top-40 soundtrack, drinking rack liquor with men in off-the-rack suits. We hope we're assuming correctly.

Whiskey Blue

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2. Whiskey Blue

Neighborhood: Midtown East
Address: 541 Lexington Ave.
Websitegerberbars.com

When overpriced cocktails are a draw instead of a deterrent, it's not a good sign. Such is the case at  Whiskey Blue, where the after-work, Cavalli-suited crowd sips $20 martinis by the bar like they were born to do nothing else. Equally grating are the women who are turned on by this kind of thing, presumably because they have Stepford Wife-style dreams of one day doing the same. If they could only master that cold, disinterested stare. The bad news is, most of them have.

Joshua Tree

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1. Joshua Tree

Neighborhood: Murray Hill
Address: 513 3rd Ave.
Website: joshuatreebar.com

Oh Joshua Tree, you lost us at hello. Walking in, we were met with skull-intrusive '80s music, the definition of starting off on the wrong foot. Mere paces later we were shoulder to shoulder with barely-legal boys who'd very much like to call themselves men, if only the pesky number on their IDs didn't say otherwise. The air was thick with Davidoff Cool Water and the pheromones of a hundred sweaty, barely-legal frat boys and girls looking to get laid, some maybe for the first time.

There may be some people out there who enjoy drinking $7 beers out of red Solo cups in close quarters with recent college graduates and throngs of women drunkenly wailing, "I WANT TO DANCE WITH SOMEBODYYYYY," in unison, and those people are douchebags. Enter at the risk of being considered one.

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