Barbam is in the basement of 32 West 33rd Street in Midtown, below a Korean restaurant called Rib No. 7. The cocktail program is built around Korean cultural references, and the drinks are more precise than the Koreatown-adjacent address might lead you to expect. The Hulu Punch arrives with strawberry tanghulu as garnish. The Cha Cha Cha is light and comes out in a teapot. The JMT involves a steel wool fire show that adds smoke to the bourbon.

The space is intimate and dark in the way that works for a basement bar that wants to be a destination rather than just a convenient option. Reservations are strongly recommended on weekends, when wait times without one can exceed an hour. The bar operates Sunday through Thursday until one in the morning, with presumably later hours on weekends given the demand.

Barbam is one of the better examples in New York of a bar that uses a specific cultural reference as a genuine framework rather than as surface decoration.