Bonnie Vee is named after a Second World War bomber plane, and the bar on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side carries that era's aesthetic without becoming a theme restaurant about it. The cocktail program is anchored in 1930s and 1940s American classics, built carefully and served in a room that feels more like a neighborhood bar than a museum of vintage mixology.

There's a garden patio out back, which changes the experience considerably in warmer months. The cocktails hold up in daylight as well as they do under the dim indoor lighting, which is a useful test of whether a bar actually made the drinks or just made the atmosphere.

The Lower East Side has accumulated a lot of bars over the years, and Bonnie Vee manages to have a genuine identity in that crowd. The WWII namesake gives it a hook, but the reason people return is the cocktail quality rather than the story.