While most bar owners spend months begging for a liquor license before they open, Two Boots impresario Phil Hartman is only now dusting off a license he’s held since his Lower East Side branch debuted last May. The chain’s Grand Street storefront will become Two Boots Tavern within a month, complete with seven stools, a few TVs, and the kind of finger food you can cook in a pizza oven. Why is it time for a drink? Because smiley-face pizzas alone aren’t paying the bills. “I lived down below Delancey Street for twelve years but I was staying home raising three kids, which I guess is what everybody else is doing too,” he says. “So I’m trying to attract people after their kids go to bed, [or] on a Sunday to watch the football game, the police and firemen from over on Broome Street, and maybe some people from west of Essex.” One lure: the long-awaited Luis Guzmán slice, which Hartman says will star “a combination of Lower East Side pickled peppers.” The actor, a neighborhood mainstay, is expected to introduce the slice himself at an event later this fall.
