The entrance to Please Don't Tell is inside Crif Dogs, a hot dog shop on St. Mark's Place in the East Village. You walk in, find the old wooden phone booth on the left wall, step inside, and dial 1 on the rotary phone. A hostess answers, and if there's room, a hidden door in the back wall of the booth opens and you go through.

Jim Meehan opened PDT in 2007 and the bar won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program in 2012. The cocktail list emphasizes pre-Prohibition classics made with precise technique and fresh ingredients. Reservations are required and they open at three in the afternoon. If you're more than fifteen minutes late you lose your reservation, which is stated clearly and enforced.

PDT is the bar that more or less started the modern speakeasy revival in New York, or at least is the one everyone points to when tracing the lineage. A lot has opened in its wake. Very little has matched it. The phone booth still works.