Squeeze into the diminutive bar named Sunita on the Lower East Side and you’ll almost certainly find Sunita Lofters, the owner and almost certainly the only Guyanese-born chemist running a bar in hipsterland.

She opened the laid-back, neighborhoody bar in 2003 simply because it’s what she “always wanted to do,” she said. This is not the place for a beer, what with Ms. Lofters’s carefully concocted drinks like her jalapeño passion martini (vodka infused with peppers, passion fruit purée, heat level modified to taste). Oh, and she’s easy to distinguish from the other employees, because there are no other employees: she opens and closes, greets, bounces, bartends, cleans, takes deliveries, mops up and keeps the books.