Photo: Alex Staniloff, via Monkey Thief's official site
Monkey Thief
A licensing shutdown killed the old room; it reopened next door with three rooms, not one.
Published
Reasons to check it out
- Reopened 14 August 2026 at 754 9th Avenue, Hell's Kitchen, after an abrupt shutdown of its original location closed the bar's first home.
- The new build splits into three connected spaces: The Court, The Train Car and The Den, each with its own bar and mood.
- Pan-Asian cocktail menu built from the founders' own travel through Asia — Thai tom kha and green-chile margarita riffs both show up in the drink names.
“A bar that gets shut down and comes back three rooms bigger, on the same block, is a better story than a bar that just opened quietly — the reopening is the news.”
— STEFAN, byline
Hell's Kitchen lost a bar and got a bigger one back. Monkey Thief opened on 9th Avenue in late 2024 as a Pan-Asian cocktail room built around its founders' time living and traveling through Asia — then shut down abruptly in 2026 after a licensing dispute, the kind of sudden closure w42st, the neighborhood's own indie outlet, was first to report in real time rather than after the fact. The team didn't relocate across town; they took over the building next door and rebuilt.
What reopened on 14 August 2026 at 754 9th Avenue is a bigger operation split into three connected spaces, per Cititour's walkthrough of the new build: The Court, styled after a Southeast Asian street market as the entry room; The Train Car, running the length of the space with a classic-rail-travel bar down its middle; and The Den at the back, the quieter room for the end of the night. It's a real expansion, not a like-for-like replacement of what the licensing issue took away.
The drink list keeps the original bar's signature moves — Resy's coverage of the first opening singled out the 7 Long Years, a spicy margarita run through green chiles and sesame, and the Major Tom, a cocktail built on Thai tom kha soup flavors rather than the usual citrus-and-sugar template. The food side runs oysters at market price, an $18 beef koi, an $18 white fish crudo and $8 fries, per the official menu — sourced this session, though the full cocktail-list pricing wasn't posted publicly at time of writing, so budget toward a standard Manhattan cocktail-bar range rather than a confirmed number until that's verified.
Recent Yelp reviews (4.9 from 68 ratings as of this write-up) call the cocktails the strongest in the neighborhood and the staff attentive without being precious about it — read as an early verdict on the new build specifically, since the reopening is barely a month old.
Sources: w42st — After an Abrupt Shutdown, Monkey Thief Finds a New Home on 9th Ave, Cititour — Monkey Thief Is Back in Hell's Kitchen With a Bigger Reimagined Home, Resy — The Drinks You'll Want to Order at Monkey Thief, Now Open in Hell's Kitchen, What Now New York — Monkey Thief Opens In Hell's Kitchen, Monkey Thief — official site (menus, hours), Monkey Thief — official site (about), Yelp — Monkey Thief, 754 9th Ave, Instagram — @monkeythiefbar
