Home / London / Cocktail Bars / The Connaught Bar, Mayfair · $$$$ · No. 12 on our 50 best cocktail bars in the world
The Connaught Bar was named The World's Best Bar in both 2020 and 2021, and it remains the gold standard for the grand-hotel martini. In a silver-leafed Mayfair room, Agostino Perrone and his team built a global reputation on a single, perfected idea: the bespoke martini, mixed at your table from a trolley, tuned precisely to your taste. It rounds out the podium of our ranking because it took one classic ritual and executed it so completely that hotels the world over now imitate it. We rank it twelfth in the world.
The world's best bar, twice
Taking the top spot on The World's 50 Best Bars once is the achievement of a career; doing it two years running places the Connaught in rarefied company. When it was crowned No. 1 in both 2020 and 2021, it joined a tiny group of bars, all of them from London, to have topped the list more than once. Its consistency is arguably even more impressive than its peaks: the bar has appeared on the ranking every year since its debut, reaching No. 2 as early as 2011, and it has stayed among the very best since its back-to-back wins, placing No. 8 in 2022, No. 5 in 2023 and No. 6 in 2025. Few bars anywhere have sustained excellence at this altitude for so long.
Agostino Perrone and the team
The bar is inseparable from Agostino "Ago" Perrone, its Director of Mixology. Born in 1978 near Como, in northern Italy, he began bartending to fund his photography studies before moving to London in 2003. He made his name at Montgomery Place in Notting Hill, where he was named a bartender of the year, and in 2008 he joined The Connaught to open its new bar, a venture widely credited with reinventing the five-star hotel bar for a modern era. He is supported by a formidable team, including Assistant Director of Mixology Giorgio Bargiani and Bar Manager Maura Milia, and his personal honours include the Roku Industry Icon Award at The World's 50 Best Bars in 2022 and a Best International Bar Mentor award at the Spirited Awards. Together the trio authored a book of the bar's recipes and iconic creations, with a foreword by chef Massimo Bottura.
The martini trolley
The signature experience is the martini trolley, a sleek black-lacquer cart wheeled to your table so that your drink can be built in front of you, because the martini, as Perrone puts it, is the most personal of cocktails. You choose everything: the base spirit (gin, vodka, or both in a Vesper style), the degree of dryness, the garnish of lemon twist or olive, and, most distinctively, a house-made bitter or tincture to finish. The bar's own bitters run to a rotating selection, including tonka bean, lavender, coriander, cardamom, grapefruit, vanilla and Perrone's signature "Dr Ago," a bergamot-and-ginseng blend named after him. The drink is stirred with care over high-quality ice and strained from a height to aerate it. The result is a martini that is genuinely yours, and a piece of tableside theatre that has become one of London's great drinking rituals.
The room
The setting matches the service. The bar was designed by the studio of the late David Collins and opened in 2008 after a Connaught renovation, and it is a jewel of restrained glamour. The walls are finished in textured platinum silver leaf, overlaid with dusty pink, pistachio green and pale lilac; the leathers are dark and hand-dyed, the tables studded, the mirrors softly luminous. Collins drew on English Cubism and Irish art of the 1920s, and the room's panels evoke a stylised Hibernian landscape. It is elegant without being stuffy, and it flatters everyone in it, which is exactly what a great hotel bar should do.
Beyond the martini
While the martini is the headline, the wider list is just as considered. Among the bar's signatures is the Fleurissimo, a Champagne cocktail created in honour of Princess Grace of Monaco, built with cognac, the house bitters and violet liqueur and topped with Champagne. The Ristretto Manhattan, a coffee-inflected take on the classic, is another favourite. The menu rotates seasonally and rewards the guest willing to venture beyond the trolley, though few first-time visitors can resist starting there.
How to visit
The Connaught Bar operates in the grand tradition, and while it has run largely on a walk-in basis at times, policies shift, so it is worth checking ahead and arriving early, especially at weekends. It is generally open evenings from Monday to Saturday. The dress code is smart casual in the Mayfair register: no sportswear, but you will not need black tie. Prices sit at the top of the London scale, with signature cocktails typically in the mid-to-high twenties of pounds and rare vintage serves running far higher. This is a bar for an occasion, and it rewards being treated as one.
Pair it with London's other great heritage room, the American Bar at The Savoy, and with the martini temple of Dukes Bar in St James's for a definitive London martini crawl. Our full London cocktail-bar guide and the wider London bar guide map out the rest.
Why it's number twelve
The Connaught rounds out our podium because it perfected a single idea so thoroughly that it changed the industry. The bespoke, tableside martini is now imitated in luxury hotels across the world, but nowhere is it done with more grace than at its source. Service is faultless, the drinks are impeccable, and the sense of occasion is total. If Bar Hemingway is the soul of the European hotel bar, the Connaught is its most polished modern expression, and that is why it sits at number twelve, the last of our top tier and the finest grand-hotel bar in the world.
What to order
- 01
The Connaught Martini
Built at your table from the trolley, finished with a house bitter such as the signature Dr Ago.
- 02
Fleurissimo
A Champagne cocktail created for Princess Grace of Monaco: cognac, house bitters, violet and Champagne.
- 03
Ristretto Manhattan
A coffee-inflected take on the Manhattan.
- 04
Whatever's on the seasonal list
The rotating menu rewards a second round beyond the trolley.
