New York Is Drinking Less Than Ever And The City's First Sober Bar Just Closed

The number that should have made Hekate rich is the number that closed it.

Gallup has American drinking at 54 percent, the lowest reading it has taken since it started asking the question in 1939. Hekate opened at 167 Avenue B in 2022 to serve exactly the people that number describes. It poured its last drink this summer, five years in, after owner Abby Ehmann said the money was not there. "We aren't making enough money," she told EV Grieve. The lease ran through September. She did not make it that far.

This is not a soft dip. From 1997 through 2023 at least six in ten Americans told Gallup they drink. That fell to 58 percent in 2024 and 54 percent last year, three straight years down, a run with no match in the whole trend line. Among adults 18 to 34 it is 50 percent, down from 59 percent in 2023. Drinkers who did drink reported an average of 2.8 drinks in the past week, the lightest Gallup has logged since 1996. For the first time on record a majority of Americans, 53 percent, said one or two drinks a day is bad for you. Whatever you think of the survey, the direction is not ambiguous and it has been pointing the same way for three years.

So the demand was real. New York felt it first, the way New York always does. Dry January stopped being a stunt. Bottle shops selling nothing but zero proof opened in Chelsea, Cobble Hill, Williamsburg and the West Village. Roving alcohol free bars started running nights at Citi Field. The sober night out stopped being a punishment and became a plan.

Ehmann already owned Lucky, a regular bar across the street. She opened Hekate because her own best customers had stopped drinking and had nowhere to go. That is the whole origin story: an operator watching her room change and building the room it was turning into. For five years Hekate was the address, the one place in Manhattan where the entire bar was dry and nobody had to explain themselves at the door. Every list, every January news segment, every out of towner asking where the sober bar is, all of it pointed to Avenue B.

Then it closed. Not because the crowd left. Because the crowd got options everywhere else, and Ehmann named that herself as the reason: more bars now carry low ABV and no booze, and the competition got real.

Here is the mechanism, and it is not a villain with a name, it is arithmetic.

A licensed bar in New York pays rent, payroll, insurance and utilities out of a check where liquor carries the fattest margin on the menu. Add a zero proof section and you spend a few hundred dollars on non alcoholic spirits and some menu design. You now capture the person who is not drinking, and you still have the four other people at the table paying full freight on real cocktails. The dry section is a bolt on. It costs you almost nothing and it wins you the table.

A fully dry room pays the same rent and the same payroll and has no fat margin anywhere on the menu. It sells the same eighty dollar table at a fraction of the take, and it eats the extra labor of building drinks that are just as complicated as cocktails with none of the price cover that ethanol provides. It is the harder business in the same city at the same rent, and it is the one that did the work of proving the market existed.

That is the whole story. The independent operator ran the experiment, absorbed the risk, taught New York that a dry night out was a real night out, and the rooms with liquor licenses collected the result. Nobody cheated. The margin just did what margin does.

Do not read this as a case against the shift. Standing at a bar in 2019 and not drinking meant fielding the little interrogation, the raised eyebrow, the just one. That is gone, and it is one of the healthier things to happen to nightlife here in a decade. Pregnant, in recovery, on medication, driving, training, or simply not in the mood, all of it now gets a real drink and no commentary. The city got less pushy. Keep that.

Keep the honest complaints too. Sixteen dollars for juice and a splash of botanical distillate is a stretch, and the wellness posturing around some of this gets tiresome fast. But the pricing complaint and the closure are the same complaint from opposite ends. When the drink is priced like a cocktail, people say they are being fleeced. When it is priced like juice, the room cannot cover rent. Hekate sat on the wrong side of that squeeze for five years.

The take that starts the fight: the dry table is winning. They remember the night. They are not slurring by ten. They are not spending eighty dollars to feel wrecked tomorrow. They wake up clear and go do it again while the other table cancels brunch.

For decades this city sold the idea that fun was downstream of the buzz. A whole generation called it and was right. The people who figured this out are not missing anything. They opted out of the hangover and kept the night.

So here is the ask, and it is not complicated. Go out dry. Order the drink the bartender is proud of. But if you care whether a fully alcohol free room exists in this city, spend at one, on purpose, more than once a year in January. The bolt on menu at the bar with the liquor license will survive without you. The all dry room will not.

Ehmann is already working on the next space on the same avenue. The category she proved is worth more than the room she lost proving it.

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