The Distinguished Wakamba Lounge

A block from Penn Station, where Eighth Avenue turns from office towers into something rougher, a bar with a name that promises more than it delivers has been pouring drinks for decades. The Distinguished Wakamba Lounge is a Dominican dive in the finest sense: a long room, a jukebox playing bachata and merengue at a volume that makes conversation a choice, a handful of regulars at the bar, and a fridge full of cold beer. Anthony Bourdain came here for No Reservations and found the New York that the guidebooks ignore: unpolished, loud, and completely at ease with itself.

The order is a Presidente, ice cold, and a shot of Jameson if the night is going that way — a combination that tells you something about the bar's clientele, a mix of Dominican regulars and the Irish and Caribbean workers who have always lived side by side in this part of Manhattan. There is no menu to speak of and no pretence of one. You drink, you listen, and you watch the door.

It is a late-night place, and it gets better the later it gets. Come after dinner, when the theatres are emptying and the neighbourhood is at its least self-conscious, and sit at the bar rather than at a table. It is cash-friendly, cheap by Manhattan standards, and genuinely without attitude, which in this borough is a rare and valuable thing.

What made Bourdain's New York hours good was that they never treated the city as a single story, and this bar is a reminder that the Eighth Avenue of commuters and tourists is also the Eighth Avenue of people who have lived here for thirty years. The Wakamba is not a destination; it is a neighbourhood, and that is the whole reason to go.