New York's speakeasy bar trend seems as contrived as a boy band. Like the velvet rope outside a Chelsea mega-club, the new-model speakeasies traffic in manufactured exclusivity. Have you imbibed in La Esquina's secret downstairs? Or sat in the Back Room's hush-hush back room? Please. We all work hard. Why must we work hard to find a drink?

Especially in the East Village. With Irish pubs and lunkhead dives galore, Second Avenue proclaims its drunkenness with lurid neon. But locating the latest, half-hidden, self-proclaimed speakeasy requires you to look down, down, down, below a Chinese body-rub joint. There, a glowing blue owl announces the signless, umm, Blue Owl.

Calling the Blue Owl a speakeasy, however, may be misleading. It's a mildly upscale, if miniature, cocktail lounge. Raw stone and brick walls, plush couches, a too-big copper bar and sexy-makin'-out candlelight form a scene in which you'll feel comfortable buying $10 drinks for a mistress. Before ordering, though, make sure you can park your keister on a seat. This may be a taxing quest.

The main bar area is supermodel skinny, bordering on chaotic when waitresses part the crowd with trays of overflowing martinis. The adjoining, postage stamp–size DJ room (really, just several couches and chairs) features a cop-quality two-way mirror door. This divides plebeians from a RSVP-only VIP room. It holds about 20 people, offers a private potty and begs this question: When did bars become an elitist, big money game in which comfort is only afforded to the highest bidder? Oh, the hoops we'll jump through for a trendy evening.

Or for a reckless sousing. Here is where the Owl excels. I am no small fan of drink slingers like Audrey Saunders (Pegu Club) and Sasha Petraske (Milk and Honey, East Side Company). With homemade tinctures and copious gin, they're filling cocktail glasses with jazz-era glamour. This, too, is the mission of Blue Owl's bar manager Charles Hardwick, who has mixed drinks at A-list bars like Pravda and the Odeon. His retro-leaning cocktails take top-shelf liquors and freshly squeezed fruit juices to an unexplored flavor country.

The Bronx is a bracing merger of Plymouth gin, dry vermouth, Punt e Mes (a mixable red wine) and orange juice, garnished with a lemon twist. The Bobby Burns borrows the Punt e Mes and dry vermouth, snazzing them up with baby-smooth Famous Grouse Scotch and a splash of aromatic Benedictine cognac. It's a manly, yet faintly herbaceous sipping drink. Sadly, I'm no booster of the titular house infusion, the Blue Owl: Gin, lemon juice and maraschino liqueur are a lip-puckering marriage. My favorite, instead, is the Roosevelt Martini. Stolichnaya Gold vodka meets dry vermouth, while two buttery olives hug the bottom like alien eyes. Order it dirty but not too dirty: The olive juice is overwhelmingly briny, and only true olive worshippers will delight in the ultra-dirty. (All drinks, $10.)

When visiting the Blue Owl you best love mixed drinks; beer fans will be disappointed. Offerings are Stella Artois standard, and drafts are absent. Perhaps this is a positive. A beer bladder may make for an uncomfortable evening since the bar just offers one crowded unisex bathroom. This is mind-boggling. If you're angling for a well-appointed atmosphere, don't make patrons wait to pee like college kids in an Upper West Side grind bar. After all, the Blue Owl attracts an adult scene. Kind of. Youngish banker-types sport khakis, suits and gelled hair; the ladies they're after wear skirts, highly polished nails and heels. They're the new, moneyed East Villagers, the sort that drop $50 on after-work beverages and the Owl's tiny plates of cheese and charcuterie. Am I jealous? Hardly.

There are 10,000 bars in New York, one for every mood. Some nights you crave dollar beer in a dive. Other times, an exquisitely crafted palliative punches the ticket. Blue Owl offers these in spades. What it lacks, however, is serenity. A rarefied cocktail joint should be serene, an oasis from the horn-honking city. Here, however, 20 customers atom bomb the mood, more so when weekend DJs blast Top 40 hits and house music. What is this, a club or a drinker's sanctuary? Blue Owl mixes a fine drink, that much is certain, but I only wish the bar's mission was as well-crafted as its cocktails.

Blue Owl

196 2nd Ave. (betw. 12th & 13th Sts.),

212-505-2583.