Public Records

Public Records is a plant-based restaurant, cocktail bar and hi-fi music venue in Gowanus, Brooklyn, opened in April 2019 by musician Francis Harris, designer Shane Davis and hospitality director Erik VanderWal. It occupies a 1910s building that served for decades as the ASPCA's Brooklyn headquarters — a history the all-vegan kitchen nods to directly. The campus spans several distinct spaces, including The Atrium, a restaurant and lounge where the bar programme runs, and a sound room built around an audiophile system that has made it one of the more serious listening venues in New York.

The Atrium menu carries a dedicated Zero-Proof section of fully constructed spirit-free cocktails rather than the token pair most music venues manage, and the builds are genuinely complex. The Palomar combines a non-alcoholic mezcal with elderflower cordial, a spiced grapefruit shrub, lemon balm and soda — the shrub supplying the acidity and length that a paloma needs and that fruit juice alone cannot give it. Not For Rita works a non-alcoholic agave spirit against the same spiced grapefruit shrub with lime, agave and damiana, the Mexican herb traditionally used as a relaxant. Press For Time is the outlier and the most ambitious: coffee with a cinnamon-lapsang-sorghum syrup, a vanilla-coconut cream whip, reishi mushroom and orange, which is closer to a dessert course than a drink. House-made sodas fill out the list.

The combination is unusually complete for a non-drinker: an entirely vegan kitchen, a proper zero-proof cocktail list, and a hi-fi room where the point of the evening is listening rather than drinking. It runs late — to 4am on Friday and Saturday — with weekend daytime service too, and is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The listening room is the reason to plan an evening here rather than drop in: when the point of the night is the sound system, nobody is counting what is in anyone else's glass, which is exactly what makes it comfortable.