As Herman Melville wrote, “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.”
Not everyone would read these words and think: cocktail bar. But for Bryan Schneider, the connection was obvious from the first time he read “Moby-Dick.”
“I’m always reading from the bartender’s perspective,” he said.
Schneider spent years tending bar for some of New York’s premier hospitality luminaries, Toby Cecchini, Julie Reiner and Daniel Boulud among them. All the while, he was thinking about Melville’s novel, which turns 175 this year.
Particularly inspiring was a description of a whalers’ watering hole called the Spouter-Inn, where the narrator, Ishmael, casts in his lot with the damned crew of the Pequod:
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way — cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round — you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously.
“I’d never read a vivid description like that before — so poetic,” Schneider said. “There were just so many cues for a bar! Yes,” he admits, “you could call it my white whale.”
Schneider’s wife, Rachel Leal, concurred. “He was obsessed with this for 10 years,” she said.
So when a space became available on Peck Slip, a cobblestone street near the docks of the South Street Seaport, it seemed the fickle gods of the sea had smiled. Schneider opened a bar called Quick Eternity there in 2025.
New York is Herman Melville country. Born in a Pearl Street boardinghouse in 1819, the author grew up in comfort in a series of homes in Lower Manhattan; his father’s initially successful importing business was headquartered on Pine Street, just a few blocks down from Peck Slip, where many of the buildings still date from Melville’s era.
Melville took to the sea in 1839, first as a merchant sailor and then as a whaler. When he published the brooding, hulking “Moby-Dick” in 1851, some critics were appalled by its literary style and the single-minded brutality of Captain Ahab. The author of what many now consider to be the Great American Novel ended up working as a customs inspector before dying in 1891 at the age of 72.
But by the 1920s, praise from William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence and others helped rescue Melville’s turbulent masterwork from the inky depths of literary obscurity. It has since been jammed onto decades’ worth of syllabuses and inspired works as varied as a German doom metal album and “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Like a Cetacean rib cage, the novel contains multitudes.
“If you think it’s just this long epic about a whale, it misses the point,” says Schneider. “It’s got so much sardonic humor.”
Encapsulating the book’s contradictions was crucial to Schneider’s vision. At Quick Eternity, guests can order a classic bowl of New England clam chowder or Spanish-style crab and salt cod fritters. The Howling Infinite cocktail may be served in a vintage mug reminiscent of a pewter drinking horn, but it gets its kick from the thoroughly modern Ancho Reyes Chili Liqueur. And the tavern’s décor evokes midcentury elegance as much as a salty patina.
Schneider enlisted a longtime friend, the artist Azikiwe Mohammed, to design the space, with its slightly unsettling whale mural, polished driftwood bar and fiberglass sculpture shaped like “the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw” that frames the Spouter-Inn’s sinister tavern keeper. The effect is moody and atmospheric without feeling too grog-soaked or old-timey.
Upstairs is the Gam, a long, cozy room that is lined with bookshelves and plays host to weekly literary and writing events. It’s become a frequent after-party spot for readings at the nearby McNally Jackson Seaport bookstore. It’s also where Leal runs the bar’s popular “Moby-Dick” book club.
This, said Leal, who studied writing in college, was always going to be part of the project.
“I’ve been running book clubs for years, so ‘Moby Dick’ — over the course of 12 months — was obvious,” she said.
“I was really worried nobody would come,” she admitted, knowing the book’s reputation as a challenging text. “Then we had the first and … we were shocked.”
The club’s penultimate meeting in September brought some 40 people to the Gam. There were local sailors from the tall ships at the South Street Seaport Museum, retired English professors, a member of the TailShakers mermaid dance troupe, real estate investors and young software engineers who live in the neighborhood.
Seated on banquettes running the room’s length, attendees sipped house cocktails named after references to the book, including the Quick Eternity — a mix of navy-strength gin, passion fruit and elderflower liqueurs, lemon juice and absinthe — and ordered from the chef Antonio Mora’s New England-inflected tapas menu.
Then, at Leal’s signal — the ringing of a sonorous ship’s bell — the conversation began.
The meeting consisted of a series of small, concurrent discussions rather than one large seminar. As a result, talk moved thick and fast, and varied wildly.
“We have people here who love Melville and have read ‘Moby-Dick’ multiple times, and we have people reading it for the first time, who don’t want spoilers,” said Leal. The veteran readers are assiduous about protecting the newcomers’ innocence.
The attendees analyzed the novel’s representations of the Holy Trinity and the trickle-down economics of whaling. They argued over which tropical wood most likely made up the stocks of the sailors’ muskets and whether Ahab’s groin was damaged by Moby-Dick.
Over the course of the evening, Ahab was likened to a maniacal tech C.E.O., the worst-ever person for a child to bring to “Take Your Dad to School Day” and a case study of midlife crisis. Would Ishmael and Queequeg, some readers wondered, have benefited from the couples therapy of Dr. Orna Guralnik?
More nautical members of the party laid out common character traits in second mates and reminisced about their own experiences while seafaring — when often, as the sailor attendee Francesca Violich Kennedy put it, “there’s nothing to do but look in the water and think about stuff.” (Ishmael might agree.)
The air was rich with irreverent laughter, stubborn loyalties and weird theories. One attendee insisted that Ahab had a young, hot wife who loved having him at sea and never once paced her widow’s walk. Long after the peal of the ship’s bell, people continued drinking, debating, discussing. There was not a phone in sight.
“‘Moby-Dick’ is the most … OK, fun is a strange word,” Schneider said. “But it’s just the best novel.”
The “Moby-Dick” readthrough will become an annual tradition at Quick Eternity, with the next round set to begin in January. “Too many people have requested it,” Leal said, “and a lot of people want to read it again.”
Before that decision was made, one set of new friends — consisting of occasional sailors, a high-school English teacher and an engineer-cum-tattoo-artist, among others — had already planned to meet at the bar each week for their own splinter reading group. Otherwise, one of them said, they’d miss getting together too much.
After all, said Andrew Kingsley, a teacher, “It’s a book about friendship. I mean … kind of.”
