The bar is named for the whiskey. Jaywalk Rye is made from Horton Heirloom Rye, a 17th-century New York variety whose roots trace to the town of Rye itself — a grain one-third the size of conventional rye that nobody had tasted in over 150 years. New York Distilling Company spent thirteen years bringing it back. When the company built a bar, there was only one name on the shortlist.
What does a smaller grain change?
Almost everything. The smaller Horton berry yields a rounder, less aggressively spicy whiskey than commodity rye — closer to orchard fruit and old wood than black pepper. It is, definitively, a rye you can hand to a bourbon drinker without a warning label.
And the jaywalking part?
“It’s a city attitude,” Allen Katz has said of the name. “It’s a New York, ‘I’m walking here’ attitude. It’s fun to be a little attitudinal.” The custom Jaywalk Air Force 1 on the back bar shelf (yes, it says “I’m walkin’ here”) makes the thesis explicit. This is a bar for people who treat the city as a participatory sport.
This column — Overheard & Over-Served — will normally be the week’s best out-of-context lines from the bar. The room is open now; start saying quotable things. Come supply us with material.