By Hannah Goldfield

The recording I made of my recent trip to Threesome Tollbooth, a cocktail bar on a desolate block in East Williamsburg, begins with nervous laughter—my own. I won’t say exactly why I was laughing, because that would spoil the surprise, but, roughly speaking, it was because to get to Threesome Tollbooth you must pass through a surprising, slightly foreboding small space, the kind of space in which you can imagine a dead body being stored, at least temporarily. Standing in theatrical silence in that space, our bartender for the night, N. D. Austin, opened a door that my companion and I otherwise might not have noticed. Suddenly, like magic (or like “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”), we found ourselves entering an even smaller space: a full-blown miniature saloon, just large enough to accommodate a single bartender and exactly two guests.

The idea for Threesome Tollbooth grew out of another of the “experiences” that Austin, who works mostly as a designer of them, orchestrated recently. A man he knew, he told us, had commissioned Austin to come up with something dramatic as a grand gesture to win over his estranged wife—a couple of some celebrity, Austin admitted, though he wouldn’t name names. (“Blink twice if it’s Jay-Z and Beyoncé!”) So Austin had put together a custom-made, one-time pop-up bar in an actual tollbooth, an abandoned one on a rail bridge over a river in New Jersey. Did it work? “They’re still together,” he said.

The project’s current iteration, inside an otherwise shuttered restaurant that still owns a liquor license, has been operating for six months, serving as many as five seatings a night. The price of a visit to the Tollbooth is a hundred and ten dollars per person; Austin and the Tollbooth’s co-creator, the lexicographer and cocktail connoisseur Jesse Sheidlower, pay rent on the closet-sized space, of an amount they prefer not to specify. “What I will say,” Austin allowed, “is that this is possibly going to work as a business and not just, like, a fun project.” So far, news of the bar has spread entirely through word of mouth. The men have allowed no press coverage; one customer who posted a photo of the bar’s street entrance online quickly became persona non grata. “They were super uncool,” Austin said.

His commitment to preserving a sense of mystery is understandable; for reasons besides its name and size, Threesome Tollbooth calls to mind Norton Juster’s beloved children’s book “The Phantom Tollbooth,” in which a young boy named Milo receives one in the mail and drives through it in his child-size electric car, finding entry into a fantastical kingdom. The tiny room is impeccably outfitted and mood-lit, panelled in dark, heavy wood, with a surprisingly large, comfortable leather banquette just big enough for two guests at one end, and a shelf-lined standing area for the bartender (either Austin or Sheidlower, depending on the evening) at the other end—if the room were big enough to have “ends.” A slat that folds down from the wall serves as the literal bar, and, as the only delineation of territory in the incredibly intimate space, the thin barrier between a confessing Catholic and his or her priest.

“Let me put it this way,” Austin said, after refusing to give up the celebrities’ names. “We’re bound by guest-bartender confidentiality, which is the most primal, serious form, more serious than confidentiality with your lawyer or your priest. It’s a really sacred code.” Indeed, we had not been inside the booth long before my friend blurted out a recent transgression, a minor theft at a hotel wedding. “I orchestrated a heist!” she declared cheerfully. “I’m only telling you this because I’ve had a gin-and-it.”

She was referring to the mixture of gin, sweet vermouth, and dill-pickle juice that Austin had served us—it’s considered, he explained, the historical precursor to the martini. Though Austin has the distinct bearing of a showman (wry, slightly mischievous expression; fedora; handlebar mustache coiled tightly at each end; the quick but precise speaking manner of a magician), and though the tinny music (Tom Waits played from a steampunk speaker that Austin built out of an old brass instrument and an old shoe, called a hobophonium) lends a dreamy, nostalgic, slightly creepy “Sleep No More” effect to the proceedings, and though he did, at one point, pull out a guitar and serenade us, both Austin and Sheidlower are quick to establish that the Threesome Tollbooth is not a theatrical experience (nor an erotic one, though, according to Austin, at least one pair of past customers mistook it as such). It is, simply, a bar.

Sheidlower, especially, is passionate about cocktails. Guests each drink several small ones over the course of their hour or so in the Tollbooth, with the exact number depending on the bartenders’ intuition, and by how fast or slow you knock them back. The menu includes a few gimmicks: the first drink is always served in the same delightfully sensory way, which engages the ears as much as the mouth. After that, patrons may be offered a series of slips of paper, two at a time, each scrawled with a phonetically similar word. Whichever one you choose (“original” or “origin”? “post-coital” or “post-brunch”?) will loosely inspire the next drink, which is measured in a graduated cylinder the likes of which you probably haven’t seen since high-school chemistry class. (Could this be why I wrote down “Mrs. Frizzle and the Magic Schoolbus” in my notebook?) Austin and Sheidlower are both avid collectors of bar paraphernalia, and they finish most drinks in a beautiful miniature nineteen-thirties German cocktail shaker—which Sheidlower describes lovingly as “one of the most amazing physical objects I’ve ever encountered in my life”—then pour them carefully into appropriate tiny vessels, whether cracking cordial coupes inherited from Austin’s grandmother or tea glasses he picked up on a trip to Cairo.

Offered “elope” and “antelope,” we chose the latter, and were presented with crisp, cold concoctions that I was about to describe as “earthy” when my friend exclaimed, “Carrot!” She was right: it was a mix of carrot and tomato eaux de vie. “It’s like V8, but liquor,” she said. “I’ve been experimenting with gazpacho-type things,” Austin confirmed. “Made solely out of booze.” My friend gasped. “Wanna know what you need?” she asked. “What?” Austin said. She paused for dramatic effect. “Dr. Brown’s. Cel-Ray. Soda.” He had never heard of it. The drinker had become the bartender. Austin spun around and grabbed something off of a shelf: a small vial of celery bitters, which he tapped into our drinks.

Read it at New Yorker

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