“Backgammon is the cruelest game — so much of it is based on luck,” said Joe Urso, who was one tournament away from earning his grandmaster title, but down a few points in his match on a recent Wednesday night last month.
Mr. Urso, 41, and several other backgammon enthusiasts were meeting for the Clinton Hill Backgammon Club’s weekly game at Funny Bar, a new jazz-bar-restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The backgammon club typically convenes in the restaurant’s conversation pit, in the center of the space that once housed a mechanical bull.
Before Funny Bar, the Essex Street venue lived several lives. It was once a Western-themed barbecue joint, then a hip-hop brunch spot. And for 40-years, it housed Schmulka Bernstein’s, New York City’s first kosher Chinese restaurant. The current owners, Tom Moore and Billy Jones, have worked some relics from these disparate incarnations into Funny Bar’s design. But they made sure the new version had no distinguishable theme.
“A lot of restaurants and clubs in New York present these very complete ideas to the customer,” said Mr. Moore, 30, whose parents met working in Chicago’s hotel industry. In the past couple of years, the rise of the overly designed clubstaurant has homogenized Lower Manhattan’s nightlife aesthetics: wood treated to look patinated, shelves packed with tchotchkes and vintage photos framed to imply a storied, local status that has yet to be earned.
Funny Bar goes through about 600 crayons a week.Credit…Graham Dickie/The New York Times