ROOF

Photo: Jeremy Bolen

How much you love the city’s newest rooftop bar depends on your patience. Have oodles to spare? You’re set to conquer a weekend night, hovering over people, waiting for them to gulp the last of their drink and snagging their seat the moment they finish. With hostesses who greet but don’t seat and a no-reservation system, good weather turns ROOF into a madhouse. So tip No. 1: Go early, and go during the week.

Tip No. 2 is to consider ROOF a bar that happens to serve food. Plans to turn a visit into dinner will be met by serviceable small plates (straightforward roasted artichokes, a decent thin-crust mushroom pizza, flavorless beef carpaccio relying too heavily on its toppings) and a strange system in which, if your visit’s anything like mine, you’ll be asked to fork over a credit card midbite because “things are getting crazy in here, and we can’t hold open a tab.” You might also get some kind of minty lime drink when you order an old-fashioned, then have the server insist that you are indeed drinking the old-fashioned. So what’s the upshot? It’s a beautiful, airy space to take visiting friends with money to burn, while showing off a bit of fun big-city swankiness. That, and the cocktails are actually quite good, even if they’re not what you ordered.

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