Montero’s Life Raft

If you’ve ever wandered off Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue into Montero Bar & Grill on a night out, perhaps drawn in by its imposing neon sign, you likely witnessed some variation on the following scene:

The bar’s second-generation owner, Pepe Montero, now late into his 70s, manning the door or perching on a barstool with his hat on, chatting with regulars. His wife, Linda, behind the bar, serving up drinks in plastic cups and perpetually refilling a cooler on the floor with precious bottles of Miller High Life. The walls: densely lined with fading nautical paraphernalia and family photos that, by now, must be structurally integral to the old building. A pool game unfoldomg in the back of the narrow barroom. 

And at the bar's center, Amethyst Valentino, with her mane of blonde hair and black-framed glasses, holds court at a laminate table, conducting the karaoke sessions that bring this former longshoremen’s bar—a monument, in many ways, to a bygone Brooklyn—roaring to new life every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. 

Apart from a 15-month closure during Covid, this was more or less the scene at Montero for the past 18 years, ever since Valentino started hosting karaoke nights in 2008—a move that introduced the now 87-year-old bar to a new, younger clientele, who formed an unlikely camaraderie with the previous regulars. Montero became the kind of place where a gaggle of Gen-Zers group-singing Shania Twain could easily mingle with older barflies who drop in to reminisce with Pepe. Montero’s charms grew to feel eternal, even if everything about its deeply grooved sense of nostalgia also reminds you that nothing last forever.

And so it goes: Earlier this year, news broke that Linda and Pepe—who started working at Montero when he was 13 years old—had sold the bar, citing an understandable wish to retire and do some traveling. 

When we say “news,” we mean actual news: Montero is beloved enough in Brooklyn and New York City in general that the impending sale stirred headlines. And as is always the case when generational change comes for a classic haunt, the community that’s grown up around Montero had questions. 

What happens when you sever an institution from the family that built it? How could new owners possibly recreate the same social alchemy? In what ways might they screw it up? How many hearts would be broken?

Those exact concerns are what motivated Alex Pincus to buy Montero alongside his brother, Miles, his business partner in the restaurant group Crew, which runs maritime-inspired restaurants across the city, including Pilot in Brooklyn Bridge Park and Grand Banks in Tribeca. (Both restaurants operate on restored boats.) Like many, Alex has a personal connection to Montero. In 2014, not long after his wife died, he found himself walking up Atlantic Avenue with a group of people after a black-tie fundraiser. Despondent, Alex looked at the people walking ahead of him and felt an urge to leave. He looked to his left, and there was Montero. “I was like, Fuck this,” he says, “and I walked right in. That was the first time I ever went there.” 

It was a karaoke night, and Alex soon found himself by the bar talking to Pepe. “Right off the bat,” Alex says, “Pepe made fun of me for wearing a tuxedo.”

The two became fast friends, and Alex has frequented the bar ever since, dropping in to see Pepe and sometimes—with enough alcohol and peer pressure—singing his rendition of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.” Since they’re both in the “nautical restaurant” business, Pepe often cajoled Alex about buying the place. And then, one day last year, he called to say he had received an offer from a potential buyer. Fearing that a money man who “doesn’t give a shit” would come in and ruin the bar, Alex talked Pepe into selling it to him instead, with the goal of changing as little as possible. 

“To be honest,” Alex says, “I don’t know if it was a good idea or a bad idea to buy it, but it’s emotionally a good idea.”

As much as it’s a static institution, Montero has seen its share of change. Joseph Montero, Pepe’s father, opened the bar across the street in 1939 before moving it to its current location in 1947—a time when Brooklyn was one of the world’s busiest ports, and Atlantic Avenue was lined with bars catering to longshoremen. It was a rough-and-tumble milieu, and Montero saw its share of action. Pilar Montero, Joseph’s wife, recalled a time when two drunk longshoremen got into a fight and went crashing through the bar’s never-replaced fish tank, sending its occupants flopping to the floor. A fight there in the ’90s resulted in a death while two off-duty cops were drinking at the bar. (They were promptly fired.) But throughout it all, Montero remained a welcoming enough place that brand-new parents would come rushing into it from the hospital across the street to order a celebratory drink, accepting congratulations from the regulars, some of whom were known to arrive as early as 9 a.m.

Some change is inevitable, and Alex knows his version of the bar will never be “Montero 1975.” But he’s committed to preserving its “essential character” once he officially takes over ownership on April 8. Every possible element of the décor will remain in place, he says. And he hopes that any new elements he introduces to the bar will come across as common-sense upgrades, like making pool games free and reopening the long-shuttered kitchen to serve up bar food. Lest that seem like too much change, Pepe will still drop in to man the door from time to time, and—crucially—Valentino is staying on. She might even start hosting karaoke four nights a week instead of three. 

For the bar’s karaoke acolytes, the news that Valentino wasn’t going anywhere came as a life raft when the sale was announced. In her words, she’s the bar’s “strict mom,” giving out hugs to regulars and helping nervous singers find their starting note, but also laying down the law. (If you intentionally sing badly, she will cut you off. And no jumping! It’s an old building.) 

“As Amethyst goes, so does that bar,” says Alex Celia, a regular who, after a bad breakup in 2022, went to Montero once a week with friends. When he tells people that, even if they’ve only been to Montero once, he says they always ask him, “How’s Amethyst?” With her Stevie Nicks vibes (she is into crystals) and inappropriate jokes, she’s crucial to the bar’s warm atmosphere. And when she takes a turn to sing—usually a ballad like Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire”—the often-rowdy crowd stands at attention. 

After 18 years, she’s inextricable, for many, from the concept of Montero. “I see these people grow up,” Valentino says. “I see them have heartbreak with one person then meet someone else and get married. It’s a beautiful thing.” 

In 2024, after a paperwork mix-up at his actual wedding, Celia legally married his now-wife, reporter Julia Black, at Montero. Linda signed the paperwork as a witness and almost signed Julia’s line by accident. “I could have been a part of this sale in a different way, I guess, if I had let that just happen,” he jokes. 

Celia and Black are now expecting a baby, and said they’ve settled on a middle name: Montero. “I'd say it's one of those 20% jokes that could become a reality,” says Black. 

On a recent night, I dropped into Montero with my friend Brian, a fellow fan of the bar. We ordered High Lifes from Linda and scribbled a couple Bruce Springsteen songs on the slips of paper she handed us with our drinks, which we dropped off with Amethyst. The bar was packed—it was prime karaoke hour, and we knew we weren’t going to stick around long enough to have our names called. We loitered near the pool table and watched as an older gentleman got up to sing a spirited “Uptown Girl.” On our way out, a 20-something guy walked up behind Pepe at the bar, clapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Glad to see you still here.”