In October 2024, a black door marked only with a silver "13" in Colonia Juárez became the most celebrated address in the drinks world. Handshake Speakeasy was named The World's Best Bar, the first Mexican bar ever to top the global 50 Best list, and it earned the honour with cocktails that look minimalist and drink like fine dining.
We rank Handshake No. 1 on our guide to the 25 best speakeasies in the world. It is famous now, undeniably, but it remains a genuine speakeasy, hidden behind an unmarked door, and it is quite possibly the most technically ambitious bar operating anywhere. That combination of concealment and craft is exactly what our ranking exists to reward, and no bar on earth currently does both better.
The door marked 13
Handshake hides in plain sight on Calle Amberes in Colonia Juárez, the achingly cool district that borders Roma and the Zona Rosa. There is no sign. You look for an innocuous black door marked with a small silver number 13, step through, and part a set of theatrical curtains, at which point the entire team greets you in a synchronised welcome that sets the tone for the evening. It is the classic speakeasy sleight of hand: an ordinary street, an ordinary door, and behind it a world built to a completely different standard.
The location is deliberate. Juárez is dense with restaurants and bars, which means Handshake blends into the streetscape rather than announcing itself, and rewards the small effort of knowing exactly where to look. For a bar that has topped the world rankings, it does a remarkable job of still feeling like a secret you have been let in on. The whole entrance is a piece of theatre, but it is also a statement of intent: everything here has been considered, down to the choreography of your arrival.
That sense of arrival matters more than it might sound. Great speakeasies understand that a drink begins before the first sip, and Handshake front-loads the experience with a ritual, the hush of the street, the anonymous door, the parted curtain, the wall of "welcome" from the staff, so that by the time you are seated you already feel you have crossed a threshold into somewhere set apart from the city outside.
From a Polanco misstep to the world's best bar
Handshake's rise was not linear. The concept was born in 2018, when co-founders Rodrigo Urraca and Marcos Di Battista sealed their partnership; the name itself comes from that handshake. An early version of the bar opened in Polanco and, by Urraca's own frank telling, struggled: the wrong setting and the wrong emphasis, closer to a place to sell bottles than to build cocktails. Like so many bars, it was pushed to the brink during the pandemic.
Two changes turned everything around. The bar settled into its current Colonia Juárez home in 2021, and around the same time Eric van Beek joined as drinks director and creative force. Van Beek, who built his reputation in the Netherlands and is a former global Bacardí Legacy cocktail champion, rebuilt the program around laboratory technique and a distinctly Mexican point of view. Under him the trajectory became almost vertical. Handshake reached No. 3 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2023, climbed to No. 1 in 2024, and held No. 2 in 2025, behind only Bar Leone in Hong Kong. Along the way it was named The Best Bar in North America in both 2024 and 2025, and The Best Bar in Mexico in 2025.
The significance of the 2024 win is hard to overstate. In the history of The World's 50 Best Bars, the No. 1 spot had gone to London or New York and, latterly, Barcelona; a Mexican bar topping the list marked a genuine shifting of the drinks world's centre of gravity toward Latin America. As Urraca put it after the win, it was gratifying that people were now travelling to Mexico for its gastronomy and cocktails, not despite the country's drinking culture but because of it.
The people behind the curtain
Handshake is, above all, a team. Urraca and Di Battista provide the founding vision and the hospitality philosophy; Van Beek drives the creative direction; and the on-site laboratory is run by manager Yiyi Aparicio, who oversees the flavour experiments that feed the menu. What is striking is how the ownership talks about the staff. Di Battista has said the real secret is the team and a uniquely Mexican sense of hospitality, and Urraca has spoken about investing in the people who work there, bringing as many of them as possible along to international events and supporting their wages and education.
That ethos is not incidental to the drinks; it is the reason they are so consistent. A bar that treats its staff as a stable, invested community rather than transient labour can sustain the kind of obsessive, repeatable technique that Handshake's menu demands. When the same people return year after year, the institutional knowledge, the exact filtration, the precise resting time, the muscle memory of a perfect pour, compounds. The hospitality and the precision are two sides of the same coin.
The laboratory behind the bar
What separates Handshake from a merely good speakeasy is what happens out of sight. The bar runs an on-site laboratory where the team experiments daily, producing clarified juices, cordials, house distillates and infusions. Many cocktails are batched and rested well in advance, some taking up to 48 hours to prepare, and passed through multiple rounds of filtration before they reach the table, so that every serve is identical to the last. The result is a menu that reads simple and stripped-back but delivers drinks of uncanny clarity and depth.
Clarification is the house signature. Handshake's clarified piña colada, for example, arrives crystal-clear and tastes refreshing rather than sweet and heavy, the technique stripping out texture and turbidity while keeping the flavour intact. Across the list, drinks that look almost like water reveal layers of flavour on the palate, a deliberate gap between appearance and taste that is central to the bar's magic. The techniques, clarification, fat-washing, redistillation, house cordials, are the sort of thing you would expect in a fine-dining kitchen, and that is precisely the point: Handshake treats a cocktail with the seriousness of a tasting-menu dish.
The back bar tells its own story. It leans hard on small Mexican producers of agave spirits, sotol, tequila, mezcal and raicilla, with the big global brands deliberately kept out of the spotlight. This is a bar with a molecular toolkit and a local heart, using cutting-edge technique to champion Mexican spirits and push back against tired stereotypes of how the country drinks.
What to drink
The best-seller, and the drink that has become shorthand for the bar, is the Mexi-Thai: tequila with makrut lime, coconut and clarified tomato, served completely transparent and tasting of far more than its pale appearance suggests. It grew out of Van Beek's love of Thai tom yum soup, and it captures the house method in a single glass, an international flavour idea, rebuilt through Mexican spirit and laboratory clarification.
From there the list runs playful and precise. The Butter Mushroom Old Fashioned layers bourbon with brown butter, mushroom, maple and enoki. Once Upon a Time in Oaxaca is an homage to Mexican mezcaleros, built on mezcal infused with mint and absinthe and served with a lit ball of steel wool. Salt N Pepper reworks the paloma with strawberry-infused mezcal and a slow-cooked bell-pepper elixir. There is a Three Sips Martini presented like a floral bouquet, and a PB&J inspired by the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The Fig Martini has been on the menu since the beginning and is, in a sense, the drink that started it all.
If you cannot decide, that is rather the point: put yourself in the team's hands. Signature serves are often available as miniatures so you can sample the range, and the staff will happily make any classic on request. The room is built to guide you rather than sell to you, and cocktails are modestly priced given their ambition, a fraction of what an equivalent drink would cost in London, New York or Tokyo.
Two floors, two moods
Handshake is not a single room. The ground floor is the Prohibition-glamour heart of the operation, all low light, dark hues and black-and-gold furnishings, with a soundtrack that leans toward the 1990s and a deliberately sensual, Gatsby-esque atmosphere. Beneath it sits a second, contrasting space styled as a contemporary Japanese izakaya, more up-tempo and set to a hip-hop soundtrack, blending the 1920s influence upstairs with something looser and more modern below.
The two-floor layout is partly a response to the bar's own success. As demand outstripped the tiny original room, the team expanded rather than compromise the experience, adding the basement so that more guests could be accommodated without the ground floor losing its intimacy. It is a smart solution to the speakeasy's central problem, that the very intimacy which makes these bars special also makes them hard to get into, and it lets Handshake keep its sense of secrecy while quietly growing its capacity.
How to visit
The ground-floor bar seats just 32 guests per service, and to spread the experience across more people each night, reservations are now capped at around 90 minutes. Booking ahead is essential; walk-in luck is not a strategy for a bar this famous. Expect a warm, choreographed welcome on arrival and an equally choreographed send-off, a chorus of goodbyes, as you leave. Service runs into the late evening, and while the mood is dressed-up and glamorous, the welcome is genuinely unpretentious.
A practical note in keeping with our policy: details like hours, booking mechanics and exact pricing change, and a bar operating at this level of demand adjusts its systems regularly, so confirm the current reservation process before you travel. What will not change is the core proposition, an unmarked door, a synchronised welcome, and a short menu of clarified, laboratory-built cocktails that punch far above their transparent appearance.
The verdict
Handshake Speakeasy is the rare bar that is both a genuine secret and a global champion. It hides behind a numbered door, greets you like a co-conspirator, and then serves some of the most technically accomplished cocktails on earth at prices that feel almost generous. It has done more than win awards; it has moved the drinks world's attention to Mexico City and shown that a speakeasy can be simultaneously theatrical, technically rigorous and deeply hospitable. For all those reasons it sits at the very top of our list. If you can only visit one speakeasy in your life, make it this one.
Ready to keep exploring? See how it stacks up against the rest of the field in our 25 best speakeasies in the world, or discover more of the city's hidden rooms, including the bar that started it all, Hanky Panky, in our Mexico City guide.