Mickey Spillane's is named after the pulp crime novelist who wrote Mike Hammer, and the bar in Hell's Kitchen on West 49th Street has the unpretentious personality you'd expect from something named after a man who sold 225 million books and didn't care who thought that was lowbrow. It's a neighborhood bar with a kitchen and enough character to distinguish itself from the midtown standard.

The crowd on a given night runs from after-work regulars to theater people to tourists who found the place and decided they liked it. Happy hour is what it is, the drinks are straightforward, and the food covers the expected territory without surprising anyone. What the place offers is a version of New York bar culture that doesn't ask you to care about craft ice or the provenance of the vermouth, which is its own kind of service.

Open nightly with live DJ events on weekends, and the kind of place that stays busy without announcing why.