New York’s Next Great Cocktail Bar Is Hiding in the West Village

Jeff Bell has never been the loudest voice in the room. “I’m a quiet guy until I have something to contribute,” he says, a line that could double as the mission statement for Kees, his new bar tucked beneath Mixteca in New York’s West Village. 

After 16 years, helping to define the tone and precision of pioneering and James Beard Award-winning modern speakeasy PDT in the East Village, Kees is Bell’s distilled point of view: understated, technical, and built around the idea that you don’t need to be loud to say a lot.

Mixteca sits at street level, an agave bar Bell runs with his partner, Victor López, the longtime PDT anchor widely regarded as one of the country’s best bartenders. The team can pull food from Tacos 1986 next door, and a narrow staircase off Mixteca leads guests down to Kees, where a flush brass door blends into the wall.

The name itself is a small clue: Kees is “seek” spelled backwards, a nod to the fact that the bar is meant to be found, not announced. Inside, the room opens in a warm glow of terrazzo, velvet, and brass — a deliberate contrast to the energy upstairs.

The idea for Kees has been with Bell for years, though he didn’t always recognize it as a separate project. Early in his career, he set a goal for himself—own a bar by 30—a checkpoint he now admits was “ego‑fueled.” But once he landed at PDT, the plan shifted. He started as a barback and worked his way up to bartender and head bartender. Along the way, he won Diageo’s Reserve World Class bartending competition in 2013 and was named the American Bartender of the Year at the 2017 Tales of the Cocktail Conference.

Eventually Bell became general manager of PDT and found that pouring his energy into the bar gave just as much back. “I didn’t need to have a new thing for the sake of having a new thing,” he says. For a long stretch, he thought he’d simply stay there. He tried to buy PDT in early 2020, only to have the deal derailed by the pandemic. The forced pause—and the birth of his son that April—gave him space to reconsider what he wanted. “I fought reality for a while,” he says. “But once I realized PDT was going to close for a bit, I felt a bit free. I could step back and ask if this was really what I wanted to do.”

He did eventually buy PDT later that year, reopening it in 2021. But the experience clarified something: PDT had its own personality, its own guardrails, and its own expectations. “Every bar should have an identity and a point of view,” he says. “PDT has a style. It’s defined. And I love that. But there were ideas I had that weren’t PDT ideas.” Kees became the place for those ideas—a bar that mirrors where he is now, at 40, with three kids, a long career, and a preference for clarity over noise.

That philosophy shows up most clearly in the menu. Instead of listing every producer and house-made ingredient—PDT’s signature verbosity—Kees organizes its cocktails into eight classic families, each with four variations. It’s a structure meant to be intuitive rather than encyclopedic. “Sometimes people want a style more than a flavor profile,” he says. “So we point them toward the style first.”

That framework lets him reinterpret classics without alienating guests. Bell thinks in blueprints, not one‑offs, and the menu reflects that. The Old-Fashioned section, for example, might eventually include a Mint Julep — not as a gimmick, but because the drink follows the same underlying formula. “Different ice, different bitters, but it behaves like an Old-Fashioned,” he says. The point isn’t to redraw the canon; it’s to show how small shifts in technique can create something that feels both familiar and new.

Related: The World’s Most Influential Bartender Just Opened a Bar in New York City

The same thinking applies to the handful of luxury drinks on the menu. Bell likes the idea of a celebratory cocktail, but not the $150‑plus price tags that have become common in high‑end bars. His Dom Collins—built with three ounces of Dom Pérignon Champagne, Cognac, lemon, and apricot—lands at $50, a number he arrived at by deliberately absorbing some of the cost. 

“I like to create as affordable a luxury as I can,” he says. “I come from a paycheck‑to‑paycheck family. I know what it's like to work minimum wage and then look at a bill and be like, oh my gosh, I just worked eight hours for this experience and it sucked.” 

A short list of classic and elevated bar fare rounds the menu out, including things like chips and dip with trout roe, prawn cocktail and steak tartare. 

Related: Andy Roddick Says This $200 Bourbon Taught Him the Biggest Lesson as a Whiskey Entrepreneur

The menu is streamlined, and so is the service. Kees runs on an all‑bartender model—no servers, no runners—so every guest interacts directly with the person will make the drink they’re going to enjoy. “Bartenders wait tables and vice versa,” he says. “It keeps the experience tight.”

Kees also taps into a particular New York mood, one Bell associates with the mid‑century era, when going out meant putting on a jacket and hospitality carried a quiet formality. He talks about that period with a kind of admiration: the engineering of the drinks, the restraint in the design, the sense that a night out should feel considered. 

It’s the experience Bell wants to bring back: a night out that feels considered, where the room asks you to rise to the occasion just a bit—not through exclusivity, but through atmosphere. He talks about creating small spaces that feel special in a city that can be loud and hurried, places where the care behind the drinks and the room gives the moment a little more weight.

“I’m not from New York—I’ve been here about 17 years—and I love that I get to do this here,” he says. “I just want to be part of it, and hopefully I’m contributing something with its own point of view.”