NEW YORK PRESS - Click here for original review PARADISE FOUND Sweet Drinks at a dive bar's sophisticated little brother By Joshua M. Bernstein Like Mongol hordes invading a foreign land, the last year has witnessed bars and restaurants marching BelDel-below Delancey Street-for the moniker-averse. Fontana's on Eldridge and Orchard's El Bocadito are creating a delicious, drunker future for the dying garment district. This inevitable transformation has fostered an alternative to what's considered one of the area's most oversaturated spots: L.E.S. rocker dive Welcome to The Johnsons. The Johnsons is often capacity-packed with art school leftovers and slumming corporates downing $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon. This breaks my heart. The Johnsons nourished my liver since I stepped onto this island. Paycheck-friendly drinks are paired with pool, tabletop Pac-Man and a rock 'n' roll jukebox. It's dive-bar perfection. Sweet Paradise, sadly, is not. The bar's skeeziest quality is its setting amid shuttered twine factories and clothing shops long out of fashion. The area remains staunchly Chinese, with a hipster smattering wandering the dark streets like tourists. Thus, Sweet Paradise was not designed to be a rabble-rousing den of inequity. Instead, it's a vaguely sexy neighborhood hangout, not unlike Nicole Richie in the right light. Sweet Paradise is outfitted with button-covered leather banquettes aplenty and dark wood walls, bare except for a single painting of a swimsuited woman. The lighting is several notches above blackout, and the music is a muddle of Willie Nelson, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the soundtrack to Married to the Mob. On slow weeknights, the long, deep watering hole can feel barren and boring, more so without a pool table. Though the bar is ideal for dates, couples are often on display like sides of beef. I visited Paradise one evening, only to find my date and I to be the only bar patrons. At 8 p.m., thankfully, the $2 mixed drinks (until 9 p.m.; $4 otherwise) and $2 cans of Genny Cream Ale (no Pabst here) were ideal nerve tonics. Your best bet is parking at the tar-black bar in front of the movie-theater candy display. In a nod to the joint's candy shop past, boxes of Raisinets, Hot Tamales and Junior Mints go for $3. The giant-eyeball Jawbreakers are, sadly, display-only. Skip the processed sweetness and instead partake in the surprisingly first-rate fruit-based concoctions. Potions like a watermelon-basil-gin puree and blueberry mojitos possess the tasty elan of cocktails at the primo East Side Company. However, the price tag is a mere shadow of Paradise's pricier brethren at only $4 during happy hour. Sweet Paradise considers itself a classy meeting spot. Connect Four and Scrabble games are available, as is a sheath of menus for food delivery. Still, the rock-bottom drink prices attract skuzzy day laborers and downbeat lushes. Depending on everyone's intoxication level, it can either create a pleasing milieu-or something far more unsavory, like when a surly drinker's hand kept gravitating toward my friend's hip. Consider these case-by-case complaints mere trifles against Sweet Paradise. It's no Welcome to the The Johnsons duplicate; that's a product of another Lower East Side, another era. Sweet Paradise is a tastier, more low-key alternative to that neighborhood's madness. For now. Sweet Paradise Lounge 14 Orchard St. (betw. Canal & Hester Sts.) 212-226-3612