Friendly bartenders keep the boozy drinks coming at Boat , and the happy hour specials are tough to beat anywhere in the borough. The jukebox is always playing interesting tunes, and the bar welcomes an eclectic crowd of locals and tourists of all ages. Cheap drinks, delicious grub, and live entertainment are on the menu every night of the week at this energetic dive.

Musicians of different genres grace the stage, and the venue hosts numerous events such as karaoke and local comedians. Rockers of all types will love this Williamsburg dive that blasts classic hits from the jukebox. Whether you fancy punk, alternative, or metal, all crowds are welcome in this no-frills establishment.

Mad Donkey has grown into one of the most popular hangouts of the neighbourhood due to its variety of craft beer on tap, mouthwatering food, and live sports. Wings and burgers dominate the food menu, but patrons can also fill up with complimentary peanuts. The bar hosts weekend DJs and other events throughout the year to entertain patrons.

At years old, LIC Bar is among the most historic watering holes in Queens. The old-fashioned, brick-walled establishment is just across the river from Manhattan, and its outdoor beer garden gives you fantastic skyline views.

The staff handcrafts cocktails with the finest ingredients, and there are daily drink specials from 12 pm-7 pm. This no-nonsense Irish pub offers a comfy atmosphere and popular imports like Guinness and Irish whiskeys.

Live music heightens the ambience, and friendly bartenders sling cheap drinks late into the night. Warm summer days can be spent in the outdoor seating section at The Quays Pub while enjoying around with friends.

Yankee diehards gather at this popular rendezvous before entering nearby Yankee Stadium for an afternoon of baseball. The gameday atmosphere is electric, and fans not attending the game gather at the bar to watch the action on TVs. The menu offers lip-smacking burgers, wings, and fries, and the kitchen is open late at night.

And they have comedy nights. This classic Bronx bar boasts a relaxed vibe and catches your eye with the sports memorabilia decorating the walls. A large backyard space hosts outdoor parties and live music events for patrons.

Top-notch service, an excellent choice of beer, and live entertainment create a dynamic atmosphere for customers. Daily happy hour specials are available from 5 pm-7 pm and karaoke sessions are hosted every Thursday night. Check out their calendar online to see the full list of events hosted at the bar.

The family-owned establishment is all about making every patron feel at home and give them an unbelievable dining experience.

Or if you fancy a break from the bar-hopping check out this 4-day itinerary for New York with tips on what to see in each of the areas with these cheap bars. I quit my job to travel in and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made.

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Home » United States » Ultimate List of Cheap Bars in New York City. Ultimate List of Cheap Bars in New York City Manhattan Brooklyn Queens Bronx Staten Island Manhattan 1.

The Library — East Village This punk rock-themed dive bar keeps the drinks flowing with two for one happy hour specials 5 pm-8 pm every day.

Clandestino — Lower East Side Clandestino gives patrons a friendly welcome to the area with its low-key vibe, festive music, and the sociable crowd. Greenwich Treehouse — Greenwich Village Greenwich Treehouse is a second-floor bar in the vibrant Greenwich Village neighbourhood and one of the coolest hangouts to grab cheap drinks.

Nancy Whiskey Pub — Tribeca Step foot into this homey whiskey tavern with friendly bartenders and delicious sippers for a quality price.

Brooklyn The Levee — Williamsburg This relaxed Williamsburg watering hole keeps the drinks flowing and games going late into the night. Another common question is what is the average liquor cost for bars and restaurants?

It's great to work with industry benchmarks, but the average pour cost across the U. isn't always helpful. That's because there are unique factors that must be taken into account for every venue.

Rent in New York City is much higher than rent in rural Nebraska. So two bars with the same pour cost, may have drastically different net profits. But as a starting point, industry averages can help you find the right path to determine how your bar or restaurants' beverage costs compare, and where you can improve.

The industry average for total beverage programs is somewhere between 18 - 24 percent. Below is a breakdown of average pour costs across different drink types. In the above infographic, we see that different drink types yield different average costs.

That's just one reason industry benchmarks shouldn't be used exclusively as a ballast for determining where your beverage cost should land. Another reason, as mentioned earlier, is that pour costs are a measure of margin, not profits.

As you can see above, pour costs for wine tend to be much higher than beer. Different establishments will have different pour costs. A wine bar is likely to have higher costs than a college bar serving mixed drinks with cheap liquor.

So it's important to recognize that while industry average liquor costs can serve as a guide, don't read into them too much. If you've read this far, you'll have picked up on a major theme of this post: liquor cost plays a big role in your profits.

But so far, we've looked at profit from the perspective of a bar's costs, but not necessarily the prices they charge for menu items and bar selections.

A beverage program's gross profit margin is the inverse of their beverage costs. Your 20 percent cost is an 80 percent margin. Which is pretty good. And that's why we started this post saying how a bar program is the engine that powers profits.

If you take a holistic approach to restaurant profits, you'll see that its quite costly to run a restaurant. Two of the major factors affecting restaurants are food and labor costs. And looking at these numbers highlights just how important a successful bar program is. The average food cost for restaurants can run between 28 to 35 percent , leaving a 72 to 65 percent gross profit margin.

About 10 percent higher on average than liquor costs. If you couple that with labor costs, which can run anywhere between 22 percent and 40 percent, then a big chunk of sales goes into staffing and food, resulting in a much lower net profit margin than liquor. Generally, the labor required to prepare and cook food is much higher than the labor required to pour wine or mix a cocktail, especially because kitchen employees earn hourly rates and don't rely on tips to subsidize income.

So the labor impact on food is significant. Generating the money to staff a restaurant and pay labor puts a lot of responsibility on a bar program, so it's key that liquor costs are low and beverage margins are high. There are a lot of things to consider when pricing drinks, but there is an easy way to establish a baseline for pricing to hit your target margins.

Let's again use the Belvedere vodka example from above. If we want to yield 80 percent on all Belvedere vodka sold, then we can use the cost per ounce to determine the price that we should charge.

Here's the formula for finding your pricing:. Desired Pour cost. The formula can be re-written as:. The average industry liquor costs infographic from above shows that different drink types have different average costs, so they also have different average margins.

You'll have to find the right margins for different areas of your beverage program that make sense for your bar or restaurant. Pricing wine has a lot of variation compared to other types of alcohol.

From the goldmine of glass pours to markups on bottles, there is a lot to consider when pricing wine. And wine cost is important, both for you and the consumer.

A survey from Wine Business found that 72 percent of customers said price is the most important factor when making wine purchasing decision. Industry standards for wine bottle markups are generally said to be around 2.

But don't be surprised to find some restaurants with 4x markups on bottles. While 2. It's a lot simpler than mixing a 5-ingredient cocktail, and even easier then opening up 2 or 3 beers during the course of a meal.

Also consider that wines generally sell at a higher price than other drink types, so while the gross margin will be lower, the gross profit can still be higher. And in the end, gross profit is almost always more important.

Except it likely took the server two minutes to find, open and pour the bottle of wine compared to 10 minutes for bartenders to make ten separate drinks. Obviously, you want to serve the wine all day.

Another element of wine pricing to consider is that the markups you charge on a bottle will be dependent on the cost of the bottle. A premium wine, one that is more expensive, will probably have a smaller markup than a more affordable wine. This is because, as noted above, profits increase with price even at lower margins.

You don't want to price out your guests from premium wines, so having a graduated pricing structure is a good strategy. From a psychological perspective, guests may think it is unfair for you to make the same margin on a premium wine as an economy wine, when the labor going into providing both is relatively the same.

Make sure you're familiar with your state laws regarding wine and liquor, because some states, like Utah, have restrictions on how much a bottle can be marked up. A wine by the glass program can generate big profits, particularly for restaurants.

It's not uncommon for restaurants to charge the wholesale cost of a bottle for a glass of wine. This also reduces the risk of glass pours in general, because if no other customer orders the same wine before the opened bottle needs to be tossed, at least you've recovered your cost on the first purchase opening the bottle.

Glass pours also appeal to a wider audience of people who may not want to commit to a full bottle, either because they don't have the time to consume a bottle, are dining with a non-wine drinker, or maybe they want a glass with lunch but have errands to take care of later.

That's why glass pours are crucial for a successful wine program. When thinking of wine, France and Italy come to mind. But there is a growing wine market with wines being produced around the world. Looking for high value wines from countries up-and-coming wine production like Argentina, Croatia, or even Spain whose wine exports are growing can provide you with great wines for a lower cost per bottle.

Because cost is a big factor in wine consumers buying decisions, you must walk a fine line with wine pricing.

That's why finding high value wines from your vendors is important. Especially if the demographics of your restaurant skew towards the late 20s to early 30s crowd. These consumers, millennials, seek a balance between value and experience.

It's important to try a variety of price points and offer a selection at varying price points and find what works best for your restaurant or bar.

Part of this is attributed to the increased popularity of wine preservation systems and devices like the Coravin, where wines stay drinkable longer. Beer isn't expensive, but it can yield pretty good margins.

Especially with draft programs. So it's important to consider how you use your draft and bottle lists. We saw earlier that draft beer can yield around 80 percent gross margins on average, while bottled beer clocks in slightly lower at around 75 percent. But that's not the only difference.

Draft beers also give you more options in terms of serving size, and make for great drink specials. You also have the advantage of rotating draft options which can keep your beer menu fresh and allow more flexibility with your beer program. An important thing to consider when pricing beer for your menu is the size of the keg.

We listed the different keg sizes above, so you can still do the cost per ounce option to find out what you should be charging for draft options. Make sure to consider the keg size and yield when pricing options. It's also important to stock different sized glassware for beers.

This will give you the flexibility to serve different sizes of beers and price accordingly. In the U. a pint is 16oz. And I'm sure you've seen the 22oz or 24oz glasses served at chain restaurants and airport bars. Or at the other end of the spectrum, your local craft beer bar probably has a few tulip glasses and 10oz.

goblets for serving high alcohol stouts. Having different sized beer glasses gives you more control over your pour costs. The nice thing about bottle, or canned beer, is that it's easy to price. You can find your margins easily, and every bottle is the same.

One advantage that bottled or canned beer has on draft beer is there is less spillage or waste. Draft beer pours can be tricky, with too much head coming out of the tap, an over pour that a careless bartender spills out into the drain before serving, or the last bits of a keg that don't ever make it to a glass.

There also isn't the hassle and cost of cleaning and maintaining draft lines. Bottle beer costs and margins are consistent, which is something of value in the chaos of running a restaurant.

Beer pricing is pretty straightforward. You should be able to say within the 75 to 80 percent margin. But because beer lists tend to be more generic even with the craft beer explosion you will want to stay competitively priced with your local competition.

By stopping into other bars and checking out their prices, you can find a good indication of what your customer base expects to pay. Using the per ounce costing calculation from the previous section you can quickly find out your pricing for the base spirit of your cocktail.

But there are other ingredients to consider when pricing cocktails. If you're making a fresh juice like pineapple juice, you will have to do some testing to see how much juice you get on average from a single pineapple. With fresh produce, there will always be some variance in how much juice each item yields, so an average amount is your best bet.

Account for the cost of each individual item, or the cost of produce purchased in bulk like lemons and apples, and find out your juice cost in the same manner you find out your liquor cost.

Say you use 1 oz. of pineapple juice in your cocktail, then you would add Still pretty simple, right? Your customers are definitely an ingredient in your bar or restaurant's success. Understanding what your customer base is willing to pay for a drink will help guide the types of cocktails you put on your menu.

Shooting for a 20 percent pour cost is a pretty safe bet. But some cocktails are more expensive to make than others, and applying a 20 percent cost to those cocktails might make them too expensive for your customers to purchase.

It's important to take this into account when pricing high-end cocktails. For these cocktails, a higher pour cost in the 30 percent range can be acceptable. Influential bartender and blogger Jeffrey Morganthaler referred to these cocktails as loss leaders in a blog on pour costs.

This is a good way to think about it, and it means that a cocktail sold at a higher-than-average pour cost can be balanced by another cocktail sold at lower pour cost.

A complex cocktail is a good way to tell customers that they can come to your bar to try something new and exciting. It boosts the appeal of your bar, without hurting your bottom line too much. Conversely, the complexity of a cocktail may also impact the time and skill needed to make it. A vodka soda can be made in 15 seconds allowing you to make of them in an hour.

A six ingredient specialty cocktail may take two minutes to make allowing you to make only 30 of them in an hour. Should both drinks have the same pour cost? Arguably no, because if your drinks take longer to make, you need more labor to serve your customers.

Menu engineering promotes the idea of not strictly relying on margins like pour cost to price and build your menu. It argues that there are other factors to take into consideration when pricing drinks or food, and a successful menu should take other variables into account.

Spirits, like draft beer, maintain some of the lower liquor costs out of any alcoholic beverage segment. The benefit of spirits over draft beer is that they often sell at a higher dollar value so you benefit from the combination of large margins and high price points.

High volume in spirits is one of the reasons that night clubs can generate some of the highest profits in the hospitality industry. With spirits like whiskey or vodka, most drinkers will order them in cocktails or mixed drinks. Or even if they drink the spirits alone, they might call for rocks or ask for a double.

All of these factors can changing the servings of spirits in a drink and the pour cost for making that drinks. For example, if someone orders whiskey on the rocks, you'll want to adjust your portion and pricing. Standard pour size for a rocks pour is usually an additional. So if your normal neat pour is 1.

Make sure to account for this with a modifier button in your point-of-sale system with an up charge associated with it. Outside of your costs to purchase liquor and other alcohol, there are a good number of factors that can impact your costs and profit margins.

Liquor costs generally only consider direct costs, not your fixed costs, which vary wildly from establishment to establishment. Remember to consider your bar or restaurant in a holistic way to find out how you should price your drinks to assure profitability for your bar program and restaurant.

The rent on your venue is one of the biggest factors to impact your net profits.

Happy hour is joyous, convivial, a financially prudent and expedient way to get a little buzzed. Sophisticated, though?

Not so much. But over the past few years, the ritual has been undergoing a bit of an identity shift. Once the domain of regulars at the raucous dive or neighborhood bar, happy hour has arrived at destination cocktail spots, sometimes masquerading under a different name: Aperitivo Hour, Golden Hour, La Hora.

The driving forces, much like the approaches, are varied. Whatever the incentive or aim, a trend emerges: Happy hour is growing up.

Every day from 3 to 5 p. Between the same hours, Spanish-style Bar Moruno in Los Angeles celebrates La Hora. It gives you the ability to stay for a few if you want to.

Respected neighborhood joints, too, are embracing happy hour. Its happy hour menu, offered weekdays between 5 and 6 p. From these adaptations, a new image of happy hour as a savvy, lighthearted ritual, one that bars can trim and tweak to their unique concept and needs, is emerging.

Bars and restaurants consider three things when deciding menu prices: the cost of goods sold for the item being sold, competition, and demand. You can gain valuable insight into your competition by doing a swot analysis.

Check out a bar or restaurant swot analysis example to get some ideas on how to do one. Using liquor cost as a goal is the most traditional and airtight way to price drinks.

Learn how to become your own liquor cost calculator. We have our goals now. Understandably, you want to lower that. You can do the same for food, but use your target food cost. Setting shot prices at bars is an easy exercise.

You just need to know how many shots in a handle see also: how much is a shot and follow the liquor cost formula and set your pricing strategy using the above method we used in the cocktail example.

The only real issues you have to account for are pouring doubles or serving drinks on the rocks. This can be easily done by making sure to have a modifier button in your POS system.

Variance for that reason is the primary way spirits affect pour cost. Alcohol is relatively cheap to acquire. Especially when you get the right liquor bottle sizes that give more value for money.

They also help cover a lot of the bar's overhead expenses. Invest in accounting software to ensure you keep an eye on these costs and always charge the optimal prices.

Your pricing strategy may need to be revisited if competition is eating into your units sold. But before lowering your prices because your competitor is, make your cocktail stand out for what makes it different. Do you use small-batch tequila? Mention it in the description. A revamped drink description and some good old fashioned menu engineering can likely get your margaritas moving off the shelf at your desired price and provide a great tool for restaurant marketing ideas.

Even if that means a higher pour cost. The bars that get this right test their pricing strategies all the time. Ever heard of psychological pricing? Our friends over in the retail industry came up with and perfected it.

But many of its principles are applicable to bars, restaurants, and menus. Even your a la carte menu , table d hote menu , or prix fixe menu can be manipulated in this way. Check it out and use some mind power!