The Rabbit Books and Bar

The corner of Avenue A and 11th Street used to sell you a Slurpee at 2 a.m. Now it sells you a paperback in translation and, a few hours later, a glass of wine at the same counter — the 7-Eleven closed and The Rabbit Books and Bar opened in its place on August 15, 2026, keeping the building's floor-to-ceiling glass and putting shelves where the coolers were.

Marianna Vaidman Stone and her daughter Emily Samara Stone own it together, and the split personality is the whole idea, not a compromise: coffee, tea and matcha through the day, then beer and wine once the sun's down, with pastries, sandwiches and charcuterie boards covering both shifts. The books lean international rather than the usual front-table bestseller stack — a shop that wants you to find something you weren't already looking for, stocked with the same care that goes into a wine list rather than treated as decor around the bar.

Where the name comes from

Emily traced part of the concept back to a trip to Ireland, where she learned about old pub "snugs" — small enclosed nooks that let women drink somewhere private back when they were first permitted in pubs at all. The Rabbit's corners are built with that same instinct: a place to read alone or drink with one other person without being in the middle of a room. It's a small, specific piece of pub history borrowed for a bookshop, not a generic "cozy" pitch.

A former 7-Eleven, not a former bookstore

Worth sitting with for a second: this isn't a bookshop that added a bar, or a bar that added shelves. It's a chain convenience store's lease, bought out and gutted, in a neighborhood where those corners usually get replaced by another bank branch or another vape shop. The glass frontage that used to light up a Slurpee machine at midnight now lights up a reading table. That's a specific kind of small-business bet — betting that a 24-hour footprint in a high-rent corner is worth more as a slow, browsable room than as a fast-turnover one.

Going, practically

It's a neighborhood spot by design — a Parisian book-café, not a destination bar — so the natural move is to drop in for a coffee, browse, and come back that same night once the shelves have turned into a bar. It sits a short walk from Tompkins Square Park, in an East Village that keeps turning convenience-store corners into something with an actual point of view.

The daytime menu (coffee, tea, matcha, pastries) and the evening one (beer, wine, sandwiches, charcuterie) run out of the same small kitchen, which is part of why the space stays legible as one thing rather than two businesses timesharing a room. Ask before you sit down in one of the snug-style nooks near the window — they're built for one or two people, not a group, and that's by design rather than a lack of tables. It's a small enough room that arriving without a plan for the evening still works: browse for twenty minutes, decide the bar side looks better than the walk home, and stay.

Why go: because most new bookshop-bars pick one identity and fake the other. This one built the daytime café and the nighttime bar as equally real businesses sharing a room, the same instinct behind a bookshop that's stayed a genuine gathering place rather than just a retail counter — and the East Village has a track record of rewarding that kind of specificity over a themed-bar version of the same idea.