A modern-day speakeasy above NYC's West Village Five Guys lets you bring your own burger and hang out in its living room-style lounge

If someone tells you they'll meet you at The Garret West, they're inviting you into this cozy, fun experience while also letting you know they're aware of the coolest hidden hot spots in Manhattan.

It's not as hard to find as you might expect a "speakeasy" to be, since the bar comes up on Google Maps, but Adam Fulton and Gavin Moseley, cofounders and visionaries of The Garret, told Insider that there's only one way to enter: through the Five Guys burger restaurant downstairs.

Walking through a burger joint to get to a classy cocktail bar may seem strange, but it also feels like the epitome of Manhattan's West Village vibe.

Plus, passing the counter and climbing the staircase made us feel like we were part of a secret club, which always adds a fun layer to a night out.

There's a beautiful bar, booth-style seating, and couches set up near a fireplace. Each couch can fit about three people comfortably.

For now, they're making some aesthetic changes to the bar as well as implementing temperature checks, COVID-19 symptom screening, and requiring contact information from at least one member of each party for contact tracing purposes.

New plexiglass dividers have been placed between booths and the traditional bar seating has been transformed into party-facing high top tables rather than bar-facing stools.

After closing on March 15 when New York City bars and restaurants were ordered to shut their doors due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Garret started selling batch cocktails to-go.

While Moseley confirmed to Insider that the cocktail retail service was only functioning during New York's stay at home order, he said the team may revisit takeaway drinks once their dining is completely settled. Like many restaurants, The Garret bars are figuring out what works best as they go.

The inside of the restroom door has 96 gold-colored doorknobs on it, which makes for a kind of scary, kind of trippy escape experience, especially if you've had a cocktail or two already.

Fulton and Moseley laughed as they told us about how guests started taking the knobs off the door!

This little nook is now limited to seating just one party as a coronavirus safety measure, Moseley told Insider. He said it's best for parties of six to eight people with a maximum party size depending on how many other patrons are in the bar at the time.

Moseley said that the bar is limiting total seating to 18 people with the host determining where to sit groups based on spacing and party size.

There's an ongoing rumor that The Garret offers three specialty Five Guys burgers exclusive to the bar. Although that was an idea back in 2014 when the bar opened, logistics proved too much of an obstacle for the team to realize this ambitious dream.

The partners said they ran the idea by Five Guys corporate, but the company "didn't believe we were serious" and shut it down as wheels were in motion.

"Maybe one day!" Moseley said. They joke around and fantasize about a day when they can install a dumbwaiter to seamlessly serve Five Guys to their customers for real.

Right now, it remains just a dream.

Hungry guests can purchase food from the burger joint downstairs and bring their dinner up to the lounge to eat while they sip on a cocktail.

The bar also has a large selection of beers, which range in price from $7 to $9 for cans or bottles, and $8 to $11 for draft pints.

When we visited in January, they had around a dozen beers on tap — most of which are domestic craft beers — and more in cans and bottles.

Grant Wheeler — the Den Hospitality partner leading its beverage department — gave us his take on the perfect Five Guys food and Garret cocktail pairings.

"The combination of the salt of the fries and the shiso in the drink could make for a nice, subtle flavor experience," he said.

The Norse Whisperer features aquavit, a Scandinavian spirit. Wheeler said the flavor is subtle like a "whisper" and the components made him want to play on the movie title "The Horse Whisperer" for the drink's name.

His pick for a fully-loaded hot dog is a gin martini.

"There's something about the botanicals and celery salty, pickle-y vibe [of the martini] with that salty, nitrite-y, cured meat quality of a hot dog and fermented toppings" that would be great, he explained.

Wheeler said that if you're going with a burger, a beer or bourbon on the rocks is the way to go. Or, he said, "Just drink water — you're gonna be thirsty."

We'd ordered a pickle-topped cheeseburger and decided to taste three of the bar's signature cocktails. The First Lady — a drink made with gin, matcha powder, egg white, and lemon — was first.

After tasting the green cocktail, we were definitely able to identify the gin, but not in an overpowering way. The egg white gave the cocktail this frothy, smooth, milkshake-like consistency while the matcha gave it that distinctive bright green color.

It's also a play on the classic cocktail, The White Lady, Wheeler said, which is made with gin, Cointreau, and lemon juice.

It's named for "the first lady of the bar": Fulton's wife, Cindy Ramirez. The matcha-based flavor profile didn't pair well with our cheeseburger, but I would try it again with a very plain burger for a meat-and-milkshake vibe.

After giving it a try, we agree that it tastes great. The smokiness of the cocktail cuts the lip-tingling spice of the fries in a comforting way — it minimizes the heat without compromising the flavor.

The story of this bourbon-based drink dates back to 1965 when The Beatles performed at New York's Shea Stadium. Fulton and Moseley were told that the band hosted an after-party in the attic, which was a two-story Indian restaurant and lounge.

Legend has it that a neighbor was there that night and got a photo of The Beatles in the space. But, Fulton said, before anyone could get ahold of the photo, "she disappeared."

Fulton and Moseley tried to corroborate her story, asking anyone they could think of if they had seen the photo. They couldn't find it, so they named a drink after the story as a tribute to this piece of unconfirmed history.

All of their other house cocktails have interesting stories behind them, too.

Wheeler found the name fitting as "there's a certain nakedness to the drink."

The flavor profile here was really powerful and beautiful. It had a strong aroma of spices that hit us as soon as we took a sip, but it was also really smooth and easy to drink as long as you're not afraid of a little flavor.

"It's a Brazilian-style rum made from whole sugarcane," which he said is typically applied to Tiki-style drinks. Wheeler found a new application for the spirit in this cocktail.

"I wanted to do something stirred and boozy," he said, "simply because we didn't have anything stirred and boozy on the menu." He described it as a riff on the classic cocktail Vieux Carré (which features rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters) and is served poured into a chilled coupe glass.

The Spikey Westchester — Wheeler's fourth iteration of a staple, spicy tequila drink — is named after the suburban county just north of New York City.

"It's an admittedly basic, admittedly suburban concept for a drink," Wheeler said, "but done with a bit more intention and thoughtfulness."

Refinery 63 is a non-smokey Mezcal drink with Singani 63, a clear Bolivian spirit distilled from grapes. The components "made me think of blog culture, and can't-get-enough culture," he said. "The name is a riff on Refinery29."

Wheeler said the drink embodies both a moment of hype around Mezcal and the lasting sleekness of Steven Soderbergh — the celebrity director and screenwriter who produces Singani 63.

The Garret isn't a bar that shuts anyone out or demands a certain level of perceived sophistication from its guests, the owners told Insider.

"We're not a pinkies-in-the-air kind of place," Fulton said.

The owners designed a neon sign for The Garret East — a sister location of this second-floor escape — that says: No bad days.

Fulton has it tattooed on his chest while Moseley has it on his fingers.

Fulton and Moseley wanted The Garret to be "anyone's bar," so they created a suit-wearing raccoon named Rocco and made him the "owner."

Rocco is a character that represents "someone who is cooler than us," they said.

The Garret West represents Rocco's home. Fulton and Moseley said they always wanted the bar to feel like a den, so much so that they had Den picked out as the name.

They told Insider that when it came to naming their first bar, they felt "Den" no longer worked since it's on the second floor of a building.

The Garret is on the top floor of the two-story building, and even though it's not the ground-floor den they envisioned, it still feels like the home of your most interesting, mysterious, friend.

There are seemingly random photographs all over the walls and a smattering of beautiful paintings throughout, which each represent a well-traveled, artistic Rocco.

The team installed the fireplace pictured above — it's non-working.

There are two other Garret locations that each represent another part of Rocco's fabulous life. A tropical hideaway is tucked away in Nolita, while a party pad sits in the East Village.

They all have some quirky random elements inside like the doorknob-covered restroom door at The Garret West.

During our visit, we saw an early customer base of laptop-users relaxing on the couches. Couples on dates and groups of friends arrived as the night wore on.

The juxtaposition of the classic grease-soaked Five Guys bag and the leaf-garnished cocktails perfectly describes the feeling we had at The Garret: It's very chic and sophisticated while keeping its guests comfortably themselves.

There's no signage for The Garret. Instead, there's just this glowing, pink "Soul" sign in the window.

For the uninitiated, the sign doesn't necessarily indicate a bar — it looks like it could just be decoration for someone's apartment.

The Garret West is currently taking walk-ins and reservations, which can be made on its website.

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