Bar Etienne

Bar Etienne took over the former Bandits space at 44 Bedford Street in the West Village, and the most visible change is underfoot: a new terrazzo floor where Bandits ran a checkerboard, per The Infatuation's reporting on the buildout. The room reopened as a French-leaned cocktail bar in the back half of 2026, though the exact opening date is genuinely contested between sources — treat "opened this past summer" as the honest claim rather than a specific day.

The drinks lean French without being precious about it. Eater NY's running list of the city's best new cocktail bars flags a tomato martini, a chocolate negroni and a banana-rum drink as the ones worth ordering. Food runs a steak au poivre and a French onion grilled cheese — bar food dressed up rather than a full kitchen menu, and there's a patio for when the room fills up.

Dessert comes from next door, not the kitchen

Bar Etienne doesn't run its own pastry program. Dessert — tarte tatin, a chocolate cake — comes from Claude Bakery, the bakery next door, a small arrangement that says more about the neighborhood than a standard in-house dessert list would.

Google Maps users put the spend around $30–40 a person, a qualitative band from eight reports rather than a menu price — read it as a rough steer, not a bill total. Recent reviews split roughly the way a month-old bar's reviews usually do: one three-star write-up from three weeks in praised the cocktails and the room but found the food underwhelming for the price, while more recent reviewers singled out the cocktails and the steak specifically. Worth going in expecting the drinks to be the stronger half of the menu.

Bedford Street already carries some of the West Village's oldest bar history a few doors down; Bar Etienne is a newer, cocktail-forward entry into that same short block rather than a destination on its own.