Fat Cat Bar
75 Christopher St.
(at 7th Avenue)
212-675-6056

http://www.fatcatmusic.org/

It’s Sunday afternoon in Manhattan and your reveling in the quiet calm of the city. Couples walk through the boroughs, looking in shop windows, drinking coffee, taking in a movie. You meet with friends and are looking for something a little bit different to do but with none of the social pressure of having to look overly elegant.

Famed gaming center, Fat Cat may just be exactly what you need. Named the best pool hall in NYC by New York Magazine, Fat Cat provides the relaxed atmosphere to practice your pool and table tennis skills, while luxuriating in the constant melody of live jazz music.

Chess and scrabble tables line the walls while big comfy couches sprawl themselves out in the center of the large room. The venue is dark peppered with bright lights hanging over the assorted gaming tables. Let’s be clear, this is not a bar with simply one old pool table in the back for kicks. Fat Cat houses at least ten pool tables and a handful of ping pong tables, as well as foosball, chess, scrabble, checkers, backgammon, Othello, go, shuffle board, late night jam sessions, and live music acts (mostly jazz and latin). In fact there is so much to do here, you may end up staying the afternoon and late into the night! We did!

We were impressed by the bar/café as well. Fat Cat offers “an eclectic line of domestic and imported beer on tap, hard cider, and saveur’s selection of wines from the U.S. and abroad.” In addition, the health conscious may just want to try the organic juices!

So after a series of magnificent ping pong matches in which I, not surprisingly, claimed victory for all who witnessed the spectacle, and then hours of heated conversation over chess and scrabble while googling our favorite words (it has wi-fi), we imagined our bill would be staggering. Yet, Fat club is the recession survivors delight. Pool, table tennis, and shuffleboard are $5/person/hour while chess and checkers, get this, $1/person.