Home / London / Cocktail Bars / American Bar at The Savoy, the Strand · $$$$ · No. 15 on our 50 best cocktail bars in the world
There are bars with history, and then there is the American Bar at The Savoy. The oldest surviving cocktail bar in Britain and one of the most storied in the world, it is where Harry Craddock compiled the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 and where the White Lady was popularised, and it was named The World's Best Bar in 2017. A century of history hangs comfortably in its art-deco room, softened by a resident pianist. We rank it fifteenth in the world, and among the fifty it is the bar with the deepest claim on the cocktail's past.
A century and more of history
The Savoy hotel opened in 1889, and the American Bar followed in 1893, moving to roughly its present position within the hotel in the early 1900s. The name reflects a Victorian and Edwardian fascination with "American" style drinks, the mixed cocktails then sweeping London from across the Atlantic. Over the following century the bar did more than serve them; it helped define what a great cocktail bar could be, and it has remained in more or less continuous operation ever since, which is why it is so often called the oldest surviving cocktail bar in the country. To sit here is to drink inside living history rather than a reconstruction of it.
Ada Coleman
The bar's first legend was a woman. Ada Coleman, known to regulars as "Coley," became head bartender of the American Bar in 1903 and held the role for over two decades, until 1926, an extraordinary tenure and, for most of the bar's history, the only time a woman ran it. She served the famous figures of the age, from Mark Twain to Charlie Chaplin, and she created what remains one of the bar's signature drinks, the Hanky Panky, a bracing mix of gin, sweet vermouth and Fernet-Branca invented for the actor Sir Charles Hawtrey. It is the one Coleman recipe credited to her by name in the Savoy Cocktail Book, and ordering it today, in the room where she first made it, is one of the genuine pleasures of London drinking.
Harry Craddock and the Savoy Cocktail Book
The bar's other towering figure is Harry Craddock, an American bartender who left the United States during Prohibition and became the American Bar's most famous name. In 1930 he compiled the Savoy Cocktail Book, one of the most influential drinks books ever printed, still in print and still essential nearly a century later. Craddock is closely associated with the White Lady, the elegant gin, triple sec and lemon sour that became a house emblem, and with the Corpse Reviver No. 2, the citrus-and-absinthe classic the book helped immortalise. Through that single volume, the American Bar shaped the cocktail canon that bars around the world still draw on today.
The world's best bar
For all its heritage, the American Bar is no museum piece. It climbed to No. 2 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2016, when it was also named Europe's Best Bar, and in 2017 it took the top spot, crowned The World's Best Bar under then-head bartender Erik Lorincz. It followed that with another No. 2 finish in 2018 and, the same year, was named World's Best Bar at the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards. That a bar founded in the nineteenth century could top a twenty-first-century ranking says everything about how it carries its history: as a living standard rather than a relic.
The people, and the pianist
The head-bartender role at the American Bar is one of the most prestigious in the business, and its recent holders read like a who's who of modern bartending. Lorincz gave way to Maxim Schulte, then to Shannon Tebay, notable as the first American to run the bar in about a century and only the second woman in the role, then to Chelsie Bailey, and, from 2024, to Angelo Sparvoli, the fourteenth head bartender, who had worked his way up within the bar itself. Presiding over all of them is a tradition older than any of their tenures: a resident pianist who plays nightly on the baby grand at the centre of the room, taking requests, giving the whole space the feel of another, more glamorous era.
The room
The American Bar is a warm, lighter-toned art-deco room, its cream-and-gold palette and electric-blue seating arranged around that central piano. It is worth distinguishing it from its sibling within the hotel, the Beaufort Bar, a darker, jet-black-and-gold room built on the Savoy's former cabaret stage, with a Champagne focus and nightly cabaret. The two make a wonderful pair, but the American Bar is the historic one, the room of Coleman and Craddock, and the one that carries the Savoy Cocktail Book legacy. Its atmosphere is elegant and grown-up, and the service matches the address.
The drinks
The heritage classics are the obvious way in: the White Lady, the Corpse Reviver No. 2 and the Hanky Panky are all made to a standard worthy of their birthplace. Around them, each head bartender launches themed original menus that draw on the hotel's history and the wider world, so there is always something contemporary alongside the canon. The bartenders carry the weight of that canon lightly, and the drinks are precise, generous and beautifully served. There are more experimental bars on this list, but none with a deeper claim on where the cocktail came from.
How to visit
This is not a bar you pop into on a whim. It now takes reservations for most sittings, generally via OpenTable, while welcoming walk-ins at the bar itself, though tables go quickly at weekends and for the evening pianist sessions. The dress code is smart casual with no sportswear, in keeping with the Savoy, so come dressed for the occasion. Hours run from around late morning into the nig