Patent Pending is inside the Radio Wave Building on West 27th Street, the building where Nikola Tesla lived and worked on wireless transmission experiments in the early 1900s. The entrance is through Patent Coffee, a working cafe that occupies the street-level space. You ring a buzzer, pass through the candlelit coffee shop, and find the door to the 34-seat bar beyond it.

Owner Ryan McKenzie opened Patent Pending in 2018 and built the cocktail program around Tesla's legacy. Drinks are named things like Light Me Up and Currents and Coils. In 2021 McKenzie added The Lab, a further-hidden bar accessible through a natural arch inside Patent Pending itself. It's a bar within a bar within a cafe, which is committed enough to the concept that it stopped being a gimmick around the second layer.

The brick archways surrounding the bronze bar top are original to the building.