The definitive ranking
From Oaxaca's tasting temples and Mexico City's agave dens to the finest mezcalerias in Hong Kong, New York and London. Ranked honestly, by genuine devotion to the spirit.
Mezcal is not tequila with a smoky accent. It is an entire family of Mexican agave distillates, made from dozens of maguey species roasted in earthen pit ovens, crushed, naturally fermented and distilled by small producers whose names and villages matter as much as any winemaker's. The best mezcal bars in the world understand this. They pour by provenance, they champion tiny artisanal and ancestral makers, and they treat a glass of wild tobalá as something to be sipped and studied rather than shot.
Because that expertise is concentrated where the spirit is made, our ranking is weighted toward the truth of it. The top of this list sits in Oaxaca and Mexico City, where the culture runs deepest, and the international entries earn their places on the depth of their collections, the seriousness of their sourcing and the honesty of their programmes. We do not publish invented ratings. Every bar below was verified as operating, and several famous names that have since closed were left off. This is where to drink mezcal properly, wherever in the world you happen to be.
Mexico City, Centro Histórico
Down a discreet, red-curtained doorway on Luis Moya in the Centro Histórico, Bósforo is the bar that turned a generation of drinkers into mezcal obsessives. There is no glossy branding here, just a dark, candlelit room, a long slim bar and a chalkboard rewritten by hand every day, organised by the Oaxacan microregions it champions: Santa Catarina Minas, Ejutla, Miahuatlán and the Chontal highlands. The pours are small-batch and often unlabelled, sourced directly from tiny producers, and the largely female bar team will steer you from an easygoing espadín toward a punchy lineño or a high-proof rarity. The World's 50 Best calls it a shrine for mezcal obsessives and the beating heart of the city's agave underground, and it earns the title. Owner Arturo Doza also runs the unmarked slow-food kitchen next door, where fresh nixtamal tortillas and clay-pot beans soak up the evening. Come early, talk to the bartenders before the crowd lands, and treat it as the pilgrimage it is. Read our full guide.
Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro
If Bósforo is the capital's temple, In Situ is Oaxaca's cathedral. Run by the writer and self-described mezcólogo Ulises Torrentera, author of the seminal book Mezcalaria, and his partner Sandra Ortiz Brena, this tiny two-level room on Morelos holds what its founders call the largest collection of traditional mezcal in Mexico, more than 180 bottles drawn from between fifty and sixty small producers across the state. Only six stools at the yard-long bar really matter. Every pour arrives with a printed card naming the agave, region, age and production method, and the staff tailor a flight of three to your palate after asking what you like. There is no salt-and-orange theatre and no industrial brand in sight, just wild silvestre agaves and unbranded artisanal lots explained with genuine scholarship. The World's 50 Best puts it plainly: it is not possible for a bar to be more dedicated to a spirit. Go early evening, grab a stool, and let them pour you the bottle you never knew you wanted. Read our full guide.
Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro
Mezcaloteca is less a bar than a library you drink in. Opened in 2010 by Silvia Philion and her partner Marco with a conservation mission, this hushed, appointment-only tasting room on Reforma lines its wooden shelves with wax-sealed bottles, each wearing the same text-heavy label that records maestro, village, agave, still type, water source and production year. As Marco puts it, if you do not list those details you either have nothing to say or something to hide. You book ahead, sit down, and a host walks you through a comparative tasting of three to five traditional mezcals, currently 550 to 720 pesos, pouring wild and cultivated tobalá side by side or copper against clay so you taste the difference for yourself. There are no brands here, only the work of dozens of small maestros, and Philion has archived a sample of every lot she has ever bought. It is the most rigorous, most educational mezcal experience in Mexico, and the best place on earth to actually learn the spirit. Read our full guide.
Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro
Founded in 2009 by Félix Hernández Monterrosa in the building where his parents once ran a mezcal expendio, Cuish is widely credited as the first modern mezcalería in Oaxaca City, the lighthouse that inspired In Situ, Mezcaloteca and many that followed. The name is a Zapotec word for the disheveled wild karwinskii agaves that were once dismissed and are now prized, and that instinct for championing the overlooked runs through everything. Cuish is producer-owned, structured as a rural production society alongside its founding maestros: Tío Rufino in Santa Catarina Minas, Berta Vásquez in San Baltazar Chichicapam, José Santiago in Matatlán and Francisco García León in Miahuatlán. Each label names the maker, because the maestro and the village are the real terroir. The bar itself is a bohemian, art-filled walk-in where exhibitions and live guitar share the room with tastings, and the small-batch list rotates so fast that if you love a bottle you should buy it on the spot. Recently relocated to Porfirio Díaz, it remains an institution. Read our full guide.
Hong Kong, Central
No bar has done more to convert the world to agave than Coa, and none outside Mexico is more decorated. Opened in 2017 by the self-taught Hong Kong bartender Jay Khan and named for the machete-like tool a harvester uses to cut the agave heart, this forty-seat room off Shin Hing Street in Central became the first bar ever to top Asia's 50 Best three years running, in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and it peaked at number seven on the World's 50 Best in 2021. Behind the bar sits a 41-page menu organised by agave species, more than 200 bottles spanning tequila, mezcal, raicilla, bacanora and sotol, plus a real coa carried back from Oaxaca and mounted in the wall. Rather than fixed flights, Khan's team pours small measures and guides you by the glass, education wrapped in a good time. The signature Paloma de Oaxaca has been on the list since day one. It is walk-in only, the queue is part of the ritual, and it earns every place in this ranking. Read our full guide.
Mexico City, Coyoacán
On the leafy Jardín Centenario in Coyoacán, Corazón de Maguey has anchored Mexico City's mezcal scene since the late 2000s. Part of the respected Los Danzantes group, it pairs a broad artisanal mezcal list with contemporary Oaxacan cooking, which makes it the ideal place to understand the spirit at the table rather than the bar rail. Where a hardcore mezcalería like Bósforo dispenses with comfort, Corazón de Maguey offers a proper dinner-and-flight evening: mole and grasshopper-dusted plates alongside pours that climb from approachable espadín to wilder tobalá and tepextate. Locals have long called it something like the international cathedral of mezcal, and while that is generous, the breadth of the backbar and the quality of the kitchen justify the affection. The Coyoacán setting, all cobblestones and cafés, is one of the loveliest in the city. It sits just below the pure tasting temples because it is as much restaurant as shrine, but for a first serious mezcal night in the capital, it is hard to beat. Browse more in Mexico City.
Mexico City, Condesa
La Clandestina opened in 2009 and has been the traditional place to drink mezcal in the Condesa ever since. It is small, candlelit and unpretentious, with a list built around several dozen artisanal mezcals sourced mainly from small Oaxacan maestros, and a reputation for taking the spirit seriously long before it was fashionable. The team hosts tastings and events, and the back rooms reward lingering with Oaxacan snacks and a rotating cast of rare bottles. Widely reported as connected to the Los Danzantes and Corazón de Maguey family, it shares their respect for provenance while keeping a scruffier, more neighbourhood feel. This is where you go to sit with a single mezcalero's espadín and actually taste it rather than shoot it, or to compare a cultivated agave against a wild one across the counter. For anyone staying in the Condesa or Roma, it is the obvious, and excellent, first stop on an agave education, and a gentler entry point than the dive-bar intensity of the Centro. Browse more in Mexico City.
Guadalajara, Colonia Americana
The best mezcalería outside Oaxaca and Mexico City sits in a muralled, music-driven room in Guadalajara's Colonia Americana. Pare de Sufrir was founded by Pedro Jiménez Gurría, who also created the small-producer nonprofit Mezonte and made the documentary Viva Mezcal, and that activism shows on the backbar. More than seventy varieties of mezcal, raicilla and traditional agave spirits, including pechuga, come from tiny producers Jiménez has spent years building relationships with, many of them makers whose work you will not find anywhere else. The name, which translates roughly as stop suffering, sets the tone: this is a joyous, unfussy place that happens to hold one of the most serious small-batch collections in the country. Listed on the World's 50 Best Discovery, it doubles as a hub for Guadalajara's agave culture and Jalisco's own raicilla tradition. If you want to understand mezcal beyond Oaxaca, and to taste the wilder western agave spirits alongside it, this is the room to do it in, and proof the movement reaches well past the southern states.
Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro
Tucked onto Ignacio Allende near Oaxaca's Santo Domingo, Los Amantes is the intimate, low-lit tasting room the local mezcal community treats as a living room. Behind the bar sits a library of some three hundred mezcals, and a guitarist often plays while the staff pour and talk you through the differences. It shares a name with a respected mezcal brand and distillery, and the atmosphere is closer to a friend's back room than a slick cocktail bar, which is exactly the point. You come here to slow down, to work through a handful of artisanal pours, and to let the evening unspool. The list leans traditional and small-batch, favouring the wild and semi-wild agaves that make Oaxaca the heartland it is. It is not trying to teach you the way Mezcaloteca does, nor to dazzle you the way a 50 Best bar might; it simply offers a deep, well-chosen collection in a genuinely warm setting. For many visitors it becomes the bar they return to every night of the trip, and it belongs in any honest Oaxaca itinerary.
New York City
The deepest agave collection in the United States lives in New York. The Cabinet, from hospitality figure Greg Boehm of Cocktail Kingdom, stocks a reported nine hundred different agave expressions, an almost absurd range spanning tequila, mezcal and the rarer distillates, sourced across multiple Mexican states. Head bartender Diego Livera, a veteran of the Dead Rabbit and BlackTail, runs the room, while agave writer and educator Noah Arenstein leads regular producer tastings and classes. What sets The Cabinet apart is not just shelf count but seriousness of intent: this is a bar built for exploration, where you can chase a single agave variety across a dozen producers or let the team guide you into territory you would never order blind. For a US drinker who wants to understand the full breadth of the category without flying to Oaxaca, there is no better single room. It is the clearest proof that the agave world has a genuine capital in New York, and it comfortably leads the American field. Browse more in New York.
Sydney, CBD
Down a narrow laneway off Clarence Street, Cantina OK! is a standing-room mezcal mecca that seats barely twenty and punches far above its size. Opened in 2019 by the MUCHO Hospitality team in a converted parking garage, it stocks hand-imported, hand-sourced artisanal agave spirits gathered by founders who travelled Mexico's producing states to build the list. The margaritas are made with hand-shaved ice and hand-pressed lime, and the whole operation runs on a kind of joyful obsessiveness. It debuted on the World's 50 Best Bars at number 28 in 2020 and has returned to the list since, remarkable for a bar this tiny on the far side of the world. There are no tables to speak of and no pretension either; you stand, you drink genuinely excellent mezcal, and you talk to whoever is next to you. For the Southern Hemisphere, it is the definitive agave bar, and one of the best arguments anywhere that great mezcal drinking is about curation and care, not scale. Browse more in Sydney.
Los Angeles
Ivan Vasquez arrived in Los Angeles from Oaxaca and built what he calls the largest private mezcal collection in the world, more than five hundred bottles spanning agave spirits from around fifteen Mexican states. His Madre restaurants, now several across the LA area, put that collection to work alongside serious Oaxacan cooking, and include private-selection mezcals sourced directly from producers that you cannot find elsewhere in the country. Education is baked into the operation, from staff training to guided flights, and Vasquez's direct relationships mean the list keeps deepening. Where a purist tasting room strips everything back, Madre gives you the full Oaxacan experience: mole negro, tlayudas and a mezcal list long enough to get lost in. It is one of the most important agave destinations in the United States, and probably the single best place on the West Coast to eat and drink Oaxaca in the same sitting. For breadth of collection paired with a real kitchen, few bars anywhere compete. Browse more in Los Angeles.
London, Marylebone
Beneath chef Santiago Lastra's Michelin-starred restaurant KOL, in a former Marylebone police station, sits one of the most credible agave bars in Europe. The KOL Mezcaleria opened in 2020 and holds what is regularly described as one of the continent's largest selections of agave spirits, built in partnership with small Mexican producers and served as agave-forward cocktails that fuse Mexican technique with British seasonal produce, paired with antojitos from the kitchen above. The restaurant's Michelin star and World's 50 Best Restaurants standing give the downstairs bar a pedigree few mezcalerias can match, and its 50 Best Discovery listing confirms the reputation. This is not a scruffy Oaxacan den; it is a polished, design-led room where mezcal is treated with the same rigour as the tasting menu upstairs. For London drinkers, and for anyone who wants to see what happens when serious agave sourcing meets fine-dining discipline, it is the anchor of the city's agave scene and the clear leader in the UK. Browse more in London.
Los Angeles, Los Feliz
If Madre is about breadth, Mírate is about conscience. This Los Feliz rooftop's beverage director Max Reis is one of the most respected voices in ethical agave sourcing, a bartender who buys what small producers actually have rather than forcing them to scale, refuses industrial brands outright, and even created a syrup he calls nogave as a sustainability statement about over-harvested plants. The result is a list with fewer big names and more genuine stories, chosen with an eye to the people and ecosystems behind each bottle. The cooking is modern Mexican and the room is stylish, but the reason Mírate matters is the thinking behind the backbar. In a category where marketing can outrun reality, Reis is a corrective, and a night here doubles as a quiet education in what responsible mezcal drinking looks like. It is one of the most substantive agave programmes in the country precisely because it prioritises substance over shelf count. For drinkers who care where their mezcal comes from, it is essential. Browse more in Los Angeles.
Dallas, Exposition Park
Texas turns out to have one of America's purist agave bars. Las Almas Rotas opened in Dallas's Exposition Park in 2017, and its owners describe it as a shrine to Mexican distillates: nothing industrial or mass-produced sits on the backbar, and every bottle carries a producer's story. The team sources carefully, opens its staff training to the wider local industry, and has become the reason Dallas is taken seriously in agave circles at all. The name means the broken souls, and the room has the warm, slightly ramshackle charm to match, but the list is anything but casual. You will find small-batch mezcal, sotol, bacanora and raicilla chosen with real intent, and staff happy to walk you through the differences. For anyone in the American South or Southwest, it is the destination agave bar, proof that a genuine mezcal temple does not require a coastline or a Michelin kitchen, just conviction and good relationships with the right producers. It is comfortably among the best in the country. Browse more in Dallas.
Singapore, Duxton
Cat Bite Club, on Duxton Road, is one of the most original agave bars in Asia because it refuses to stop at agave. Opened in 2023 by San Francisco-trained bartenders Jesse Vida, formerly head bartender at Atlas, and Gabriel Lowe, it bridges Mexican agave spirits and Asian rice spirits, offering flights across two to three hundred artisanal bottles that let you taste sotol, tequila and mezcal beside their Asian cousins. It won the Campari One To Watch award in 2024 and landed on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2025, and it featured in the World's 50 Best global agave guide. The concept could be a gimmick in lesser hands, but the depth of the library and the seriousness of the sourcing make it a genuine specialist rather than a novelty. For drinkers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia, it is the most rewarding place to explore agave, and one of the very few bars anywhere thinking hard about how these distilling traditions relate to one another. Browse more in Singapore.
Baltimore, Remington
Clavel, in Baltimore's Remington neighbourhood, is that rare agave bar with an ethical mechanism built into its business. Opened in 2015 by Lane Harlan, Matthew Pierce and chef Carlos Raba, it pairs Sinaloan food with a carefully hand-sourced agave list that the team travels to Mexico to build. The standout detail is that on a quarterly basis, ten percent of the tasting bar's proceeds go into a profit-sharing programme for the producers themselves, a concrete answer to the industry's long-running questions about fairness. Beyond that, it is simply a wonderful place to drink, with excellent tacos, a warm room and staff who know their mezcal. The list favours small producers and terroir over big brands, and the whole operation runs on genuine respect for the makers. Baltimore might not be the first city you associate with agave, but Clavel has quietly become one of the most principled and enjoyable mezcalerias in the United States. It is a model for how these bars can give back rather than simply extract. Browse more in Baltimore.
Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro
Named for the Mazatec curandera María Sabina, Sabina Sabe is Oaxaca's most celebrated cocktail bar, and while it is more mixological than the city's neat-pour temples, its mezcal credentials are impeccable. It ranked number 22 on North America's 50 Best Bars in 2023 and has stayed on the extended list since, the only Oaxaca City bar with that kind of international recognition. Alongside its inventive drinks, built on Oaxacan ingredients, it pours exceptional local spirits neat for those who want them, which makes it a natural bridge between the world of the tasting room and the world of the cocktail. The room is stylish and buzzy, a welcome change of pace after an evening of contemplative sipping at In Situ or Mezcaloteca. It also lends its name and expertise to projects abroad, a sign of how far its influence now reaches. If you want one night in Oaxaca that shows what contemporary Mexican bartending can do with agave rather than around it, this is the address.
Berlin, Kreuzberg
Continental Europe's biggest agave selection, by its own account, sits in Berlin's Kreuzberg. La Lucha, founded by Max Paarlberg on the Paul-Lincke-Ufer canal, welcomes guests with around 125 bottles of agave distillates and pours mezcal and tequila flights alongside the rarer bacanora, sotol and raicilla, all served next to modern Mexican food. The room is lively and contemporary, a proper restaurant-bar rather than a hushed tasting den, but the depth of the backbar is serious enough to satisfy a committed agave drinker. For a city better known for techno and natural wine, La Lucha is a genuinely credible mezcal destination, and the obvious anchor for agave in Germany. It captures something the best of these European bars share: a willingness to import painstakingly and pour generously, so that drinkers thousands of miles from Oaxaca can still taste the spectrum of what agave can do. If you are in Berlin and want more than a token mezcal on the list, this is where to go. Browse more in Berlin.
Tokyo, Roppongi
In the basement of a Roppongi building, Agave has quietly been Tokyo's temple to Mexican spirits for decades, billed as one of the largest tequila and mezcal bars in the world with something like four hundred expressions in stock. This is a connoisseur's room, an upscale cantina where the spirit is poured for contemplation rather than shots, and measures range from the affordable to the genuinely rare. Japan's bartending culture prizes precision and reverence, and Agave applies both to agave, treating each bottle with the seriousness a great whisky bar affords its rarest malts. It carries no 50 Best ranking, but among those who know, it is the reference agave bar in Asia's biggest drinking city. For a traveller who wants to taste widely and calmly, guided by staff who understand the collection, it is a remarkable place, and a reminder that the appreciation of mezcal now spans the globe. Come for the depth of the shelf and stay for the quiet, unhurried ceremony of it. Browse more in Tokyo.
Amsterdam, Jordaan
Amsterdam's first mezcalería opened in 2015 inside the former Lucas Bols distillery building on the Rozengracht, and it remains the Netherlands' most serious agave destination. Salmuera's treasure wall holds well over a hundred agave bottles spanning Oaxacan terroirs plus raicilla, bacanora and sotol, and the kitchen leans toward Argentine and Latin American grilling, so the spirits have something substantial to sit beside. It is a warm, convivial room rather than an austere tasting library, but the collection rewards curiosity and the staff are happy to guide you deeper. For a European drinker, it is proof that the agave movement long ago outgrew Mexico's borders, and for anyone in Amsterdam it is the clear choice for mezcal beyond the ordinary. The bar's longevity, now a decade in, speaks to how well it has done its job of building an audience for these spirits in a city that once had none. It is a founding pillar of Northern Europe's agave scene. Browse more in Amsterdam.
San Miguel de Allende
Bekeb is San Miguel de Allende's most acclaimed bar, and although it is a cocktail bar rather than a neat-pour mezcalería, its command of Mexican spirits earns it a place here. Founder Fabiola Padilla, a former bartender at Enrique Olvera's Cosme in New York, built a menu she calls a Mexican herbolaria, drawing on native botanicals and ancestral spirits including mezcal to create some of the most distinctive drinks in the country. It has appeared on North America's 50 Best Bars for three consecutive years and drawn coverage from the New York Times, Vogue and Food & Wine. Recently relocated to an indoor-outdoor space at the Live Aqua hotel, it keeps the author-driven, deeply Mexican sensibility that made its reputation. This is the place to understand how agave lives inside the contemporary cocktail rather than in a copita, and Padilla is one of the most important bartenders working in Mexico today. For San Miguel de Allende, it is unmissable, and a fitting flagship for the Bajío region.
Los Angeles, Downtown
Las Perlas, in Downtown Los Angeles, bills itself as the city's first dedicated mezcal bar, and it helped seed America's agave obsession before most drinkers knew what mezcal was. Part of the Cedd Moses bar group, it stocks a reported four to five hundred agave spirits arranged by region, inside a warm Oaxacan-cantina space that leans more party than seminar. It is not the education-first temple that some of its newer rivals are, but its historical importance and the sheer scale of its list keep it firmly in the conversation. On a busy night it is loud, fun and unmistakably Angeleno, a place to drink margaritas and mezcal in equal measure and to appreciate how far the agave world has come since it opened. For a first-timer it is an approachable and generous introduction; for a veteran, the depth of the backbar still holds surprises. As one of the original American mezcal bars, it earns its place in any honest global ranking. Browse more in Los Angeles.
Melbourne, CBD
Melbourne's most agave-dedicated bar sits on Lonsdale Street in the CBD. Mezcalito, a sister venue to Touché Hombre, focuses almost entirely on mezcal and agave, with somewhere north of sixty-five varieties on the backbar and a team that treats them with proper respect. Australia already has the world-class Cantina OK! in Sydney, and Mezcalito is the natural counterpart in the south, the place Melbourne drinkers go when they want to move past a token pour and actually explore the category. The room is convivial and the list deep enough to keep a curious drinker busy across many visits, ranging from easygoing espadín to the wilder agaves that reward patience. For a city with one of the best drinking scenes on earth, it is a welcome specialist, and a sign that agave has found a committed audience in Australia beyond a single famous laneway bar. It rounds out our ranking as one of the finest mezcal bars in the Southern Hemisphere. Browse more in Melbourne.