Bar Pleiades at The Surrey: A Short History of an Upper East Side Cocktail Lounge
For a little over a decade, a small room at 20 East 76th Street showed New York what a hotel bar could be when it took its drinks as seriously as its upholstery. This is our account of it, written from public reporting, old menus and the memories of people who drank there.
By Margot Ellery · · Updated · 7 min read
Ask anyone who spent an evening on the Upper East Side between the late 2000s and 2020 to describe Bar Pleiades and you will usually hear the colors first. Black lacquer, ivory leather, mirrored surfaces, a quilted pattern on the walls that looked as if someone had borrowed it from a handbag. Then people mention the drinks, and then the quiet. It was a room for conversation, not a room for being seen, even though plenty of people who wanted to be seen went there anyway.
This journal shares the name of the bar's old web address, and we think that comes with a responsibility to tell its story accurately. We have no connection to the restaurant group that ran it or to the hotel. What follows is a reader's history, pieced together from contemporary reviews, the bar's archived menus and newspaper coverage.
A bar inside The Surrey
The Surrey is a residential-style hotel on East 76th Street, just off Madison Avenue, a block from Central Park. Its ground floor had been tied to the chef Daniel Boulud for a long time. His flagship restaurant, Daniel, opened there in 1993 before moving south to East 65th Street, and the space then became Café Boulud in 1998. The café earned a Michelin star and a loyal neighborhood crowd, and the hotel's lounge next door was eventually reimagined as a proper cocktail bar that took its food from the café kitchen.
The bar was named after Pleiades, a French restaurant remembered as a gathering place for the Manhattan art world of the 1970s and 1980s, when galleries clustered along Madison Avenue and the side streets of the East Seventies. The name was a nod to that era of dealers, collectors and painters having a late drink after an opening. It also happened to be the name of a star cluster, the Seven Sisters, which suited a room built around glamour.
The look: Chanel, the 1930s and a lot of black and white
The interior was designed by Lauren Rottet, an architect known for luxury hotel work. The brief, as reported at the time, drew on Coco Chanel and the 1930s. In practice that meant a strict palette of black and white, glossy lacquered surfaces, leather walls stitched in a quilted diamond pattern, low banquettes and soft, warm lighting that made everyone look as though they had just come back from somewhere sunny.
It was a small room, which mattered. Small hotel bars force a certain behavior on their guests: you lower your voice, you notice the bartender, you sit longer than you meant to. We have written separately about how Art Deco shaped the look of cocktail bars and what makes a hotel bar great, and Bar Pleiades is a useful reference point for both.
A menu written in four chapters
The most distinctive thing about the bar, for people who cared about drinks, was the way its cocktail list was organized. Rather than grouping drinks by spirit, the menu was divided into four French-titled chapters:
- La Tradition, the classics, usually printed with the name of the bartender or book credited with each recipe and a year. An Old Fashioned sat next to a Hanky Panky credited to Ada Coleman and the American Bar, a Vieux Carré credited to Walter Bergeron at the Hotel Monteleone, and a Jack Rose sourced from an early twentieth century drinks book.
- La Saison, seasonal drinks that changed several times a year. Modern classics appeared here too, including the Penicillin, credited to Sam Ross of Milk & Honey.
- Le Potager, the kitchen garden: drinks built around market produce and, in some years, foraged plants, with little botanical notes printed under the recipe.
- Le Voyage, drinks with a passport: a Singapore Sling, a Hemingway Daiquiri, punches and tropical ideas.
Printing the source and date of a classic recipe is now common, but it was less common at the time, and it told guests something important about the bar's attitude. These were drinks with a history, and the bar wanted you to know it. Our own menu guide borrows that four-chapter structure as a way of organizing this journal, and our cocktail index covers many of the same classics.
The people behind the stick
Several bartenders shaped the program over the years. An early Time Out New York review praised the precision of the drinks made by Cameron Bogue, singling out a sloe gin fizz with house rhubarb bitters. Later, the program was led for a long stretch by Darryl Chan, whose name appears on archived menus as head bartender and who was quoted in food and drink magazines on pairing cocktails with food and on cooking with spices behind the bar.
The kitchen connection was a real advantage. Bar snacks came from Café Boulud: oysters, charcuterie, cheese, sliders on brioche, arancini and warm madeleines to finish. That relationship between the glass and the plate is something we explore in our guides to bar food and pairing cocktails with food.
Milk punch and the cocktail revival
Bar Pleiades also turns up in an unexpected corner of cocktail history. When the New York Times wrote about the revival of milk punch in 2014, one bar owner explained that he had first tasted the drink at Bar Pleiades in 2009 and was hooked. Clarified milk punch, an eighteenth century technique, is now on menus everywhere. In the late 2000s it was a curiosity, and small serious bars like this one helped bring it back. We cover the method in our guide to clarified milk punch.
Jazz, apéritif hour and the neighborhood
For a while the bar offered live jazz on Friday nights, and in later years it promoted a French apéritif hour in the late afternoon, with spritzes, Suze and tonic and small plates. It was a neighborhood bar for a very particular neighborhood: gallery staff, residents of the surrounding townhouses, hotel guests, people killing an hour before dinner at the café. Travel writers listed it among the classic Upper East Side hotel bars, and magazines used it as a setting for stories about how to drink well in New York.
2020 and after
In March 2020, along with every other bar in New York, Bar Pleiades closed when indoor service was suspended. It never reopened in its old form. The hotel's management company went through bankruptcy and lost control of the property, and in 2021 it was reported that Daniel Boulud would not return to The Surrey and that a different restaurant would take over the ground floor. Café Boulud later reopened a few blocks away on the Upper East Side. The bar, as people knew it, became a memory.
That is the reason this site exists in the shape it does. The old address was linked from newspapers, magazines and neighborhood guides that recommended a drink at a black and white bar on East 76th Street. We cannot pour that drink for you. What we can do is write about the things the bar stood for: classic recipes told with their history, seasonal and garden-driven drinks, good food alongside good cocktails, and rooms designed for lingering.
A short timeline
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1993 | Daniel Boulud opens his restaurant Daniel on the ground floor of The Surrey, East 76th Street. |
| 1998 to 1999 | Café Boulud opens in the original space in 1998 as Daniel moves to East 65th Street. |
| Around 2009 to 2010 | The hotel's lounge reopens as Bar Pleiades, designed by Lauren Rottet; early reviews praise the drinks and the black and white room. |
| 2010s | The four-chapter cocktail list, apéritif hour and Friday jazz define the bar; it appears regularly in New York newspapers and magazines. |
| March 2020 | The bar closes with the rest of the city's hospitality industry at the start of the pandemic. |
| 2021 onward | Café Boulud leaves The Surrey and later reopens elsewhere on the Upper East Side; the hotel's ground floor passes to new operators. |
Dates for the opening are approximate: we have found reviews from 2010, but not a reliable opening announcement. If you have a menu, photograph or memory from the bar's early years, we would love to see the evidence behind it, and we will correct this page when better sources appear.
How to drink like it was 2012
If you want to recreate an evening at Bar Pleiades at home, start with a Hanky Panky or a Vieux Carré, put out a plate of good charcuterie and some warm gougères, and finish with a madeleine and a small glass of something sweet. Keep the lights low and the music quiet. The full set of recipes is in our cocktail index.
What we learned from it
If we had to boil the Bar Pleiades approach down to a few lessons, they would be these:
- Credit your sources. A classic recipe is better when you know where it came from.
- Organize a menu around ideas, not bottles. Chapters like tradition, season, garden and travel tell guests how to choose.
- Feed people properly. A bar with a real kitchen behind it is a different kind of bar.
- Keep the room small and the voice low. Atmosphere is a design decision.
Those are the principles we try to follow here. If you drank at Bar Pleiades and remember a drink, a bartender or an evening we should know about, we would like to hear about it through the details on our about page.
Sources and further reading
Questions and answers
Where was Bar Pleiades?
It was inside The Surrey hotel at 20 East 76th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, next to Café Boulud.
Is Bar Pleiades still open?
No. It closed in March 2020 when New York suspended indoor service and did not reopen after the restaurant group left The Surrey in 2021.
Who designed Bar Pleiades?
The interior was designed by Lauren Rottet, drawing on Coco Chanel and the 1930s, with black and white lacquer and quilted leather walls.
Is this website connected to the original bar?
No. Pleiades is an independent cocktail journal and has no affiliation with the former bar, its owners or the hotel.
