The corner of Nassau Avenue and Diamond Street is home to Greenpoint’s newest neighborhood bar, which opened last weekend with a laid-back watering hole vibe in the former Good Move space.
Minnows (167 Nassau Ave.) is from owners Cassie Barnard, Greg Nearhood and Oliver Cleary, who all have long backgrounds in the New York City service industry. Cleary and Nearhood are partners at Honore Club (173 Irving Ave.) in Bushwick, and Barnard is a former partner at the bar Creepys in Portland, OR.
“Our goal with Minnows was to open a really great corner bar,” Nearhood said in a statement to Greenpointers. “We wanted a bar where the person drinking a beer and shot special would feel just as at home as the person next to them sipping a well made drink from our cocktail menu.”
The cocktail menu is priced accordingly with mixed drinks ranging in price from $9 for pond water ( a “sweet mystery drink”) to $10 for a frozen grasshopper. Drafts and cans/bottles of beer are are also on the affordable side ranging from $4 – $8, and the food menu is hot-dog centric (with a vegan option) starting at $4.
“The three of us had been looking at potential spaces for quite sometime before we found 167 Nassau,” Nearhood said. “We would have signed the lease in November if we could have, but one hold up after another got us all the way to the first week of March when we finally signed. We immediately started demolition and not even a week later the pandemic shut down was announced and we were forced to halt construction until the middle of June.”
With the pandemic putting a temporary freeze on the economy last winter, many of the original investors backed out. “Despite all the setbacks we couldn’t be more excited to be getting our doors open(ish). Things aren’t exactly as we planned, for one we can’t afford a new awning, but if that’s the worst of our problems we count ourselves blessed.”
Minnows is now “open early” (approximately 2 p.m.) and closes late everyday.