An Islanders Manhattan-based bar to rise again after pandemic shutdown

For Mike Walsh, it felt like fate.

About six months after moving in with his fiancee, Jessica, a new bar in Chelsea opened that was about a five-minute walk from their apartment.

It wasn’t just any new watering hole for Walsh, who grew up in Nassau County. It was a bar dedicated to his beloved hockey team, and a place that he immediately knew he was going to repeatedly frequent to watch the Islanders while making new, like-minded acquaintances. Walsh figured the Offside Tavern “was going to be my ‘Cheers’ — the local bar where I get to know everybody.”

As an Islanders fan living in Manhattan, it wasn’t always easy to find somewhere to watch the games at a public establishment. Even if a bar was willing to put on a hockey game, the more popular Rangers would take precedence. The only two options were usually stay home or miss the game entirely.

“A lot of times you go into a place and you have to get there maybe an hour before the start because the TV would be taken over by even New York City FC, or something like that,” Walsh said, referring to the local Major League Soccer team. “The TVs would be claimed really quickly for other sports. Unless you had a dead sports night … and even in a best-case scenario, you weren’t going to get sound.”

Walsh saw the Offside Tavern grow from a place that attracted a smattering of Islanders fans when it first opened in early 2017 to somewhere that was overtaken by nearly everyone wearing blue and orange. Weekend road games, in particular, drew capacity crowds. It even attracted team personnel, including co-owner Jon Ledecky, whom Walsh says he chatted with for at least 20 minutes one night when the Islanders were getting beat by the Blue Jackets. But then, of course, came the pandemic. The Offside Tavern eventually had to close. This hit Walsh harder than he expected and led to an awkward moment with Jessica.

“I’m not a big crier, but I definitely welled up a little bit,” said Walsh, 37. “(She) was looking at me like I had three heads because a week earlier due to COVID, our wedding got postponed and I didn’t shed a tear. She was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

The Offside Tavern on 14th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, attempted as best it could to stay open through the pandemic. During the 2020 bubble playoffs, the bar had access to some outdoor street seating as the Islanders made their run to the league semifinals before bowing out to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning.

But just a couple of days into that playoff run, owner Nick Costa knew it was likely to be their last. In his estimation, they went from approximately 250 patrons per day to maybe 40 that summer. Financially, they were at the end of their rope, and the doors shut for good shortly after the Islanders were eliminated.

But Costa, 39, is back to work with partner Thomas Fischetti on the Lower East Side, planning on reopening the Offside Tavern and making it bigger and better than before. Fischetti found a new location, on Avenue A and Sixth Street, which they hope will be ready in time for the Islanders’ season opener Oct. 13. The duo is doing all of the interior work themselves on the multiple-room locale, which was most recently the home of an uppity cocktail bar. There is still plenty of work to be done, as well as the important matter of getting their liquor license rubber-stamped by the state government (it’s already been approved by the community board).

Along with moving into a place with double the square footage, the new bar will have a much more robust menu thanks to the previous tenants installing the necessary and expensive equipment that they couldn’t otherwise afford. At the previous location, they were limited to items like chicken fingers and tater tots … er, “tater Trotz,” that is.

“People are very excited,” said Costa, who maintains a TikTok page with construction progress reports. “I’ve kind of kept the exact location under wraps, but people have deduced from videos that I’ve posted where exactly we are, and they’ve been right.”

The new Offside Tavern will also be more versatile. It even includes a subterranean space that could potentially be fashioned into a speakeasy-type bar of its own.

“The cool thing about this particular location is it’s nice and compartmentalized,” Costa said. “We’re an Islanders bar, and then we’ll transition into something different for the late night. It’s going to take some getting used to, but everything we’re doing, we’re trying to be as smart as possible with it.”

Costa got into the Islanders as a kid. After living in the small town of Potters Bar, England, for two years, his family relocated to Westbury, Long Island. He recalls going to his first Islanders game as a 9-year-old, thanks to a friend having his birthday party at Nassau Coliseum. He can even recall the opponent, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.

His fandom grew even more when Islanders defenseman Bryan Berard would pop out on their street from time to time to play ball hockey and give him and his friends some pointers.

“That was that,” he said. “I was obsessed.”

After working in the bar and restaurant industry for a little while, Costa decided to take the leap and open a place of his own. As an Islanders fan in Manhattan, he knew the frustrations of fans who wanted to go out and watch their team, and he figured the Offside Tavern would fill that void. It’s similar to the thought process of another hockey bar in New York, The Canuck, which opened in late December last year and was packed with Canadians and hockey fans throughout the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs (something this writer can confirm).

“I knew then that there was this hole in the Islanders community that they didn’t have a place to watch the games in the city,” Costa said. “I knew that because I lived in the city and I wanted to watch the games.”

Business was tepid at first. The Islanders’ missing the playoffs that season didn’t help matters.

The tipping point for success came in the 2017-18 season, when Costa was featured on an MSG commercial that ran during Islanders games. It was the kind of free publicity that most bar owners can only dream of.

“Holy crap, talk about exposure,” Costa said. “Then people knew us, and it was awesome. It was insane. We went from maybe 20 to 30 people to wall-to-wall, couldn’t move.”

Islanders team personnel took notice, too, and it wasn’t just Ledecky who found his way through their doors. Anders Lee’s wife held a get-together there for the wives and girlfriends one night when the Islanders were on the road, and then even showed up with her husband on a night between games.

Costa, much to his dismay, wasn’t there when the Lees were, but the bartender alertly made a quick FaceTime call so they could at least say hi to one another. On his way out, Lee left a wad of cash with the bartender for the Islanders game later that week.

“He told us to use that until it runs out the next game,” Costa recalled. “People would be like, ‘Give me a Bud Light and a shot of Jameson,’ and I was like, yeah, that’s on Anders Lee.”

Costa wasn’t nearly as excited when one of the organization’s senior vice presidents left his business card there, though. Immediately, he was worried that the Offside Tavern signage — the old Islanders fisherman logo, with a bottle of Jameson in the fisherman’s hand rather than a hockey stick — would have to go.

Instead, it led to an invite for him and the staff to join Ledecky in his suite for an Islanders home game. Regarding the logo, Costa was instructed that he could continue to use it, but “just don’t sell it on merchandise,” he said. “Done. Deal.”

(UBS Arena / Dennis DaSilva)

It was that relationship that Costa developed with team bigwigs that eventually led to the sparkling new UBS Arena naming one of the bars on the concourse after the Offside Tavern, which Costa lobbied for on Twitter. He didn’t have much involvement in the launching of that other than providing a few cocktail recipes, but was honored nonetheless.

“Our vision for UBS Arena was to embrace the authenticity of Islanders fans,” said Oak View Group Chairman and CEO Tim Leiwicke, in a statement provided by the team. “There was no better way to do so than to keep alive the legacy of Offside Tavern, which was New York City’s home away from home for the fans.”

Costa said: “It was an honor to have them name that after us. If we had never opened again and that was the last breath of the Offside, that would (have been) OK.”

Instead, the bar is set to get a second life. And Walsh will be there, even if it’s on the other side of Manhattan. Perhaps he’ll even bring Jessica, who, by the way, is now his wife after the COVID-19-postponed wedding was eventually rescheduled.

“I’ll be definitely one of the people in line, for sure,” he said.

(Photo of Offside Tavern at prior location before it closed in 2020 courtesy of Nick Costa)

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