Craft cocktails in the 1659 tavern where George Washington once drank — restored wood panelling, original bar, ornate plaster ceilings. The most atmospheric room in New Haven; the one that ruins every other cocktail bar.
The Full Picture
The site of Ordinary has been hospitable since 1659, when New Haven's first "ordinary" — the colonial word for tavern — opened at the corner of Chapel and College and began pouring drinks for travellers whose horses were still sweating from the road. Benedict Arnold drank here. George Washington stopped in 1775 on his way north to take command of the Continental Army. Taft may have stayed upstairs when the Taft Hotel, built around the tavern in 1911 and designed by F. M. Andrews of New York, was the finest hotel between New York and Boston. This is, in other words, not a bar that needs to invent its own mythology.
What is now called Ordinary opened in April 2013 after a careful restoration of the original tavern room inside the Taft building. The restorers preserved what mattered: the century-old bar itself, the dark-panelled wainscoting, the ornate plaster ceilings that almost no other room in Connecticut can match. The lighting is low but legible. The music is audible but never the point. On any given weeknight the room is filled with a sensibly-dressed mix of Yale faculty, downtown lawyers, couples on date two, and travellers who have found their way up from the Omni. It is, by any reasonable measure, the most beautiful room in New Haven.
The cocktail program is a greatest-hits of American drinking, which is the right choice for a bar that genuinely has historical gravity. The Rye Old Fashioned is the house benchmark — orange peel, Demerara, a single cube — and the Sazerac is made with the reverence the drink deserves. The French 75, the Bee's Knees, the Calvados Sidecar, and the house original called the Viking Funeral round out a list that trusts its classics to do the work. The bar food is thoughtful rather than ambitious: oysters when the season warrants, charcuterie, a small selection of snacks designed to absorb without distracting. Beer and wine programs are selected enough to keep a non-cocktail drinker content without dominating the point of the room.
Ordinary is not a dinner restaurant. It is the bar you go to before dinner at Union League, or after dinner at Zinc, or on its own when you want an evening to feel like it is happening inside a novel. For a team dinner, it is a superlative second act. For a first date, it is the bar that makes the date memorable without you having to try.
Why Ordinary Works for a Team Dinner
Team dinners benefit enormously from a change of venue after the main meal — the moment when the formality of the dining room gives way to the conversation that actually matters. Ordinary is engineered for that moment. The room seats a group of eight to twelve comfortably, either along the bar or in a cluster of leather chairs near the back. The cocktails are strong enough to register but measured enough to extend the evening without destroying the next morning. Most importantly, the historical weight of the room — the fact that Washington stopped here, that the wood panelling predates most of America — gives the conversation a frame. Team dinners want narrative, and Ordinary supplies it for free. Start with dinner at a Chapel Street room, walk two blocks, and let the evening shift register.