Baby's All Right

Overview

A 5,000-square-foot bar, restaurant, and 280-capacity music venue in South Williamsburg, co-founded in December 2013 by bookers Billy Jones and Zachary Mexico in a former Hygrade Food Products hot-dog plant, that became an anchor of the 2010s Brooklyn indie corridor and a national proving ground for breakout artists.

Baby's All Right occupies the former Hy-Grade Provisions plant at 146 Broadway, a squat industrial building one block off the Bedford Avenue L stop that the venue's design team, Hecho, Inc. (responsible also for The Box and The Flatiron Room), with LED technology by Tucker Viemeister, transformed into a three-room hybrid: a two-sided front bar and lounge, a Latin American–focused dining room under chef Ronald Murray (alumni of Bouley and Acme), and a 280-capacity rear showroom separated from the bar by a retractable wall engineered to prevent sound bleed. Programmable LED arrays (fashioned from upcycled hotel ashtrays wired to color-reactive lights) line both the bar and the stage back wall, giving the room its signature warm retro glow alongside astrological charts, contoured ceilings, and overlapping wallpaper scraps described by one reviewer as evoking a 'Wes Anderson-curated mother ship.' The total footprint is 5,000 square feet; standing capacity is cited variously as 280 to 330 depending on configuration. Co-founders Jones and Mexico had both worked the booking desk at Pianos on the Lower East Side before opening Baby's All Right in December 2013 as part of a short-burst wave of small Brooklyn rooms (along with Glasslands Gallery, 285 Kent, Death by Audio, and Market Hotel) that briefly made South Williamsburg the center of the city's independent music economy. Jones, who also served as a DJ on The Lot Radio and managed artists including Porches, was the more publicly visible of the pair, described by colleagues as 'hugely friendly, welcoming' and encyclopedically knowledgeable about music; Mexico, author of the China Underground journalism project, brought a cross-genre curatorial bent. Their stated programming philosophy on opening was deliberately promiscuous: 'all stripes' of live music, from bluegrass and post-punk to traditional Nepalese music and fringe electronica, alongside comedy and panel discussions. In practice the room emerged as a reliable first-room for artists on the edge of wider recognition: early-career sets from SZA, Billie Eilish (at age 15), Lorde, A$AP Rocky, Blood Orange, Charli XCX, and Ariel Pink are cited across multiple sources; James Murphy, David Byrne, and Hot Chip played the stage as names rather than breakthroughs. Mac DeMarco reportedly composed a short 'theme song' for the venue. The room's longevity through the mid-2010s collapse of the Williamsburg DIY corridor (285 Kent and Death by Audio closed in 2014; Glasslands in 2015) established it as the durable institutional anchor of that era's Brooklyn scene. A 2017 social-media episode, the venue posted a photograph of what it claimed was a $24 bar tab with no tip, attributed to Kendall Jenner, brought outsized national attention; Jenner disputed having left no tip. The venue was referenced in Lorde's April 2025 single 'What Was That,' a measure of its emblematic status in a certain strain of 2010s Brooklyn cultural memory. In 2024–25 Jones and partner Tom Moore, working with the Knitting Factory, opened Night Club 101 at 101 Avenue A in the East Village (the former Pyramid Club space) as a Manhattan sibling room; Jones died on June 7, 2025, at age 45, from glioblastoma. A memorial was held at Baby's All Right in early July 2025. As of 2026 the venue continues to operate under the Baby's All Right name.

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