The ranking
The speakeasy began as a necessity, a hidden door during Prohibition, and became an art form. These 25 bars keep the secret alive: unmarked entrances, phone-booth doors, walk-in fridges and swinging bookcases, each guarding a room that pours some of the finest cocktails on earth. We ranked them on the drinks first, then on the theatre of getting in, the influence they have had on the craft, and their standing in awards like The World's 50 Best Bars. Every entry links to a full profile.
No bar has done more to rewrite what a speakeasy can be. Behind an unmarked black door marked only with a silver "13" in Colonia Juárez, Handshake was crowned The World's Best Bar in 2024, the first Mexican bar ever to top the list, and held on at No. 2 in 2025. Drinks director Eric Van Beek runs an on-site flavour laboratory where deceptively simple-looking cocktails hide up to 48 hours of clarification, fat-washing and house distillation: the Mexi-Thai folds Thai tom yum into tequila; the Once Upon a Time in Oaxaca arrives lit by a ball of steel wool. The whole team is trained as bartenders and greets each of just 32 guests with a synchronised welcome through theatrical curtains. It tops our list because it marries genuine hospitality, a patriotic championing of agave spirits, and the most quietly ambitious technique in the business. Where many speakeasies trade on the door alone, Handshake makes the liquid the real secret. It is the definition of a modern speakeasy that earns its secrecy.
Push open the door of a walk-in refrigerator inside a pastrami shop in El Born and you step into what looks like the inside of a whale: a curved, sinuous wooden ceiling above a Carrara-marble bar. Paradiso, opened in 2015 by Tuscan-born Giacomo Giannotti, became in 2022 the first bar outside London or New York to be named The World's Best Bar, and it has barely left the top five since, sitting at No. 4 in 2025. It earns second place for turning theatre into substance: annually re-themed storytelling menus, a dedicated R&D lab, and set-piece serves like the Supercool Martini, where a supercooled spirit freezes into a stalagmite of ice the instant it meets a frozen olive. Crucially, the spectacle never eclipses the drinking. The cocktails are genuinely excellent, drawing drinkers of every generation rather than just cocktail obsessives, and the hidden-fridge entrance still delivers the jolt of surprise every great speakeasy needs. It is the world's most gloriously theatrical secret door, backed by world-class liquid.
Attaboy occupies 134 Eldridge Street, the Lower East Side address where Sasha Petraske opened Milk & Honey in 1999 and, in doing so, arguably launched the modern cocktail movement. When Petraske moved on in 2012, his protégés Sam Ross and Michael McIlroy took over the tiny room and kept its discipline alive. There is no menu and no sign: ring the buzzer, take one of roughly 25 seats, and tell the bartender what you feel like. What comes back is bespoke, classically built drinking from the people who helped write the modern canon; Ross is the creator of the Penicillin and the Paper Plane, two cocktails now poured worldwide. Named the No. 1 bar in North America in 2022, Attaboy ranks this high because it is the living heart of the whole speakeasy revival: the room that proved a hidden door, a short list of great spirits and flawless technique could change global drinking. It remains the most reliable bespoke bar in America.
To reach Speak Low you enter Ocho, a bar-tools shop, and push a hidden bookshelf that swings open onto a staircase climbing through a stack of ascending bars, each floor more exclusive and expensive than the last, ending in a members' room of rare whiskies. It was built in 2014 by Shingo Gokan, the Japanese bartender who won the global Bacardí Legacy competition in 2012 with a cocktail called "Speak Low," and who cut his teeth at New York's Angel's Share. His concept, "what if Prohibition happened in Shanghai?", brought a New York speakeasy sensibility, executed with Japanese precision, to a city that had nothing like it. Speak Low reached No. 10 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2017 and is credited by Gokan himself with changing China's bar scene. It ranks fourth as the finest speakeasy in Asia: a textbook-perfect hidden entrance, escalating tiers of intimacy, and East-meets-West drinks like the matcha-whisked Speak Low that gave the bar its name.
Step into Crif Dogs hot-dog shop on St Marks Place, enter the vintage wooden phone booth, pick up the receiver, and if there is room, the wall swings open. Opened in 2007 by Jim Meehan and Brian Shebairo, PDT (Please Don't Tell) is the bar that gave the modern speakeasy its defining image, and the phone-booth-in-a-hot-dog-shop conceit became the most imitated entrance on earth. Inside is a narrow, taxidermy-lined den seating around four dozen, serving inventive cocktails alongside Crif Dogs' deep-fried, bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Its influence is hard to overstate: it was the No. 1 bar on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2011, won the first-ever James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program in 2012, and its Benton's Old-Fashioned introduced fat-washing to the cocktail world. The PDT Cocktail Book became a reference in professional bars everywhere. It ranks fifth as the template-setter, the bar thousands of hidden rooms are still copying today, and the single most influential speakeasy of the modern era.
Down a discreet street-level door near Old Street lies the basement that did more than any other to revive London's speakeasy scene. Nightjar is a 1920s-styled room with live jazz, swing and blues every single night, and a cocktail list organised as a history lesson: menus split across pre-Prohibition, Prohibition and post-war eras, with elaborately garnished signatures that treat each drink as a small theatrical event. It reached the very top tier of The World's 50 Best Bars, peaking at No. 2 in 2013 and sitting in the global top three across 2012 to 2015, and its house style of obsessive garnishing, rare ingredients and era-named drinks has been endlessly copied across the city. It ranks sixth because it fuses two things few bars manage at once: serious, museum-grade cocktail scholarship and a genuinely atmospheric nightly music programme. For many drinkers, Nightjar is the definitive London hidden bar, and the reason a whole generation of Shoreditch speakeasies exists at all.
From the street, Candelaria is a genuine, tiny taqueria in the Haut Marais, turning out real tacos at a white-tiled counter. Walk to the back, through an unmarked door behind the kitchen, and you find one of the bars that transformed Paris drinking. Opened in 2011 by the Quixotic Projects team, it brought agave spirits, mezcal, tequila and sotol, and a loose, joyful energy to a city whose cocktail scene had been sleepy and self-serious. Its signature La Guêpe Verte (tequila, agave, jalapeño, cucumber, lime) became a modern Paris classic, and Candelaria was a fixture on The World's 50 Best Bars from 2012 through 2018, peaking at No. 9 in 2013. It ranks seventh because it is the rare speakeasy that is also unpretentious fun: no somber reverence, just a brilliant hidden bar behind a taco counter that kicked off the entire Parisian hidden-bar wave. Few doors on this list deliver a better before-and-after surprise, or a livelier room once you are through it.
Finding The Baxter Inn is half the ritual: an unmarked door down a laneway off Clarence Street, then a staircase into a cellar-like basement so hard to locate that staff at a neighbouring bar routinely point lost drinkers in the right direction. Opened in 2011 by the Swillhouse group, it is Sydney's benchmark whisky den, a towering, ladder-served back bar holding one of the largest whisky selections in the southern hemisphere, spanning Scotch single malt, bourbon, rye, Japanese and Irish. It has appeared on The World's 50 Best Bars year after year since opening, peaking at No. 6 globally in 2015, and its bar team and spirits list have been recognised internationally at the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards. It ranks eighth as the finest speakeasy in the southern hemisphere and the definitive laneway secret: no sign, no fuss, just an encyclopaedic whisky wall and the quiet confidence of a bar that has never needed to advertise where it is.
Before Handshake, there was Hanky Panky, widely credited as Mexico City's first true speakeasy and the bar that seeded the city's now world-beating hidden-bar scene. Opened in 2016 by Walter Meyenberg in Colonia Juárez, its exact address is released only on reservation; guests are led through an unassuming Oaxacan street-food spot and through what looks like a storage door into a Prohibition-glamour room of marble and copper. Named for the classic cocktail invented by Ada Coleman at the Savoy, it pairs faithful classics with technique-driven originals and recipes borrowed from top bartenders worldwide. It reached No. 42 on North America's 50 Best Bars in 2024 and has been honoured by The World's 50 Best Bars for its hospitality. It ranks ninth as the pioneer that proved Mexico City could build destination speakeasies, laying the groundwork on which the country's current dominance was built. The warmth of the welcome, as much as the drinks, is why it still draws a crowd a decade on.
The name is the joke and the concept: Employees Only hides behind a glowing "Psychic" sign on Hudson Street, and you pass a working fortune-teller's nook and a velvet curtain to reach the Art Deco room within. Opened on 5 December 2004, exactly 71 years after Prohibition's repeal, by five hospitality veterans from Pravda, it became a defining venue of the American cocktail revival and a school for a generation of bartenders. Its white-jacketed staff, late-night kitchen, end-of-night "shift drink" ritual and house Manhattan variation set a template that spread worldwide, spawning outposts from Singapore to Los Angeles. A long-running fixture on The World's 50 Best Bars, it celebrated its 20th anniversary in December 2024. It ranks tenth because it defined the sociable, insider, industry-beloved end of the speakeasy spectrum: proof that a hidden bar could be a raucous institution as well as a temple to technique. Few rooms on this list are more purely, unapologetically fun once the curtain closes behind you.
Operation Dagger is found by following hobo-code symbols chalked onto otherwise blank walls down a back alley off Ann Siang Hill, then descending into a windowless basement crowned by a cloud of hundreds of exposed lightbulbs. Bare concrete, stone tables and no branded bottles on display, because almost everything is made in-house. Opened in 2014, it built its reputation on one of Asia's most avant-garde, ingredient-driven programmes: house fermentations, distillations and cordials in place of a conventional back bar, with a menu that changes as the experiments do. It reached No. 30 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2019 and has been named the region's most creative cocktail bar. It ranks eleventh because it pushes the speakeasy idea past mere secrecy into genuine invention: the hidden entrance is only the first surprise, and the drinks that follow refuse to look or taste like anyone else's. For adventurous drinkers, few hidden rooms in the world are as thrilling to discover.
Tokyo's Ginza district hides dozens of tiny, unmarked basement counters, and none is more revered than Bar High Five, run by master bartender Hidetsugu Ueno. There is no printed menu: you name a spirit and a flavour direction, and Ueno, internationally famous for his diamond-cut hand-carved ice, builds a drink to order, omakase-style. The room is small, the service exacting, and the craft absolute; a perfectly clear, slowly melting sphere of ice is treated as seriously as the spirit poured over it. Named the Best Bar in Japan at Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2019 and a regular on The World's 50 Best Bars, it is the archetype of the Japanese speakeasy: a hidden door concealing not spectacle but monastic precision. It ranks twelfth because it represents an entire philosophy of bartending, quiet, bespoke and technique above ego. To sit at Ueno's counter is to understand why the world's best bartenders make pilgrimages to Ginza's discreet, sign-less basements.
From the sidewalk in Denver's LoHi neighbourhood, Williams & Graham is a working bookshop. Give your name, and a bookcase swings open to reveal the Prohibition-era cocktail bar behind it. Opened in 2011 by veteran bartender Sean Kenyon, it pairs a genuinely charming bookstore front with a serious drinking programme: a library of more than 500 spirits, a roster of classics executed with care, and a menu of house originals. It was a James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Bar Program in 2013 and 2014 and named American Cocktail Bar of the Year at the 2015 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards. It ranks thirteenth as the best of the American bookcase-door speakeasies and one of the country's most influential craft-cocktail bars outside the coasts, proof that the hidden-bar renaissance reached deep into the mountain west. The bookshop conceit is executed with real warmth rather than gimmickry; you almost forget there is a bar back there until the shelf gives way beneath your hand.
Named for a line in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," Callooh Callay has been a Shoreditch landmark since 2008, and its through-the-looking-glass conceit is one of London's most beloved: a mirrored wardrobe door swings open to reveal the hidden back bar, JubJub. Founded by Richard Wynne, it made its name on invention, with playful, whimsical interiors and cocktail menus presented as cassette tapes, comic books and other left-field formats that changed the idea of what a drinks list could be. It reached No. 9 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2012 and won World's Best Cocktail Menu at that year's Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards. It ranks fourteenth because it captures the imaginative, mischievous side of the London speakeasy scene, a bar that treats the secret room and the menu as a single creative playground. The Narnia-style wardrobe into JubJub remains one of the most delightful hidden-door reveals in the city, and the drinks more than reward the search.
At 79 Queen Street, a faded barbershop advertising 25p haircuts fronts one of Britain's most inventive hidden bars. Descend a short flight of stairs, push through a door disguised as a bookcase, and you reach Panda & Sons, a candlelit, Prohibition-styled basement founded in 2013 by bartender Iain McPherson. Beyond the theatre of the entrance, it is a serious innovator: McPherson is internationally known for his work in "ice science" and directional freezing, alongside barrel-ageing and house infusions that push cocktails in genuinely new directions. It ranks fifteenth as Scotland's standout speakeasy and one of the UK's most creative bars, a place where the barbershop-and-bookcase gimmick is more than earned by the liquid behind it. Edinburgh has no shortage of atmospheric cellars, but few combine the surprise of the hidden door with this level of technical ambition. It is the rare speakeasy where the drinks are talked about as much as the way you get in.
Behind a heavy, carved old wooden door on Soi Nana, in Bangkok's Chinatown, sits the tiny bar that helped turn a sleepy lane into the city's hottest drinking street. Teens of Thailand, opened in 2014 by craft-spirits importer Niks Anuman-Rajadhon, was Bangkok's first dedicated gin bar: a dim, characterful shophouse room stocking dozens of gins and building locally inspired gin and tonics infused with Thai tea, chrysanthemum, jackfruit and salted guava. It has been named to Asia's 50 Best Bars and won that list's Sustainable Bar Award in 2020. It ranks sixteenth because it shows the speakeasy format at its most personal and place-specific: a hidden door opening onto a bar that could exist nowhere but Bangkok, using local ingredients to reinvent a global classic. Its influence radiates far beyond its handful of seats, since much of Soi Nana's now-celebrated bar scene grew up in its wake. Small, secret and quietly pioneering.
Few speakeasies commit to the bit like Evans & Peel. To get in, you "book a case," descend to an office on Earl's Court Road and present your story to a private detective seated behind a desk of evidence, at which point a bookcase swings aside and admits you to a 1920s drinking den. Opened in 2012, it leans fully into Prohibition role-play: bootlegger-styled cocktails served with theatrical flourish, and live 1920s jazz, swing and blues on weekend nights. It ranks seventeenth for sheer immersion. It is one of London's most committed interactive speakeasies, where the entrance is a genuine short performance rather than a single hidden latch. It is more experience than awards-circuit contender, and that is precisely the point: the fun is in the detective's office, the swinging shelf and the sense of having talked your way past a gatekeeper into somewhere you should not be. For first-time speakeasy-goers, few London doors are more purely enjoyable to walk through.
The bar has no sign and no obvious door: its unmarked shophouse address is literally its name. Behind that anonymous 1960s facade near the Singapore River is one of Asia's most important cocktail bars, 28 HongKong Street, opened in 2011 and modelled on the great early-2000s New York bars, serving American-style craft cocktails and comfort food in a dark, buzzy room. Its drinks list nods to hip-hop, with serves named for rap lyrics, the banana-and-cognac "6 Foot 7 Foot" among them. It was crowned No. 1 on the inaugural Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2016 and spent five consecutive years on The World's 50 Best Bars, reaching No. 7 globally. It ranks eighteenth as the bar that helped put Singapore, and Asian cocktail culture more broadly, on the world map, using pure address-as-secret anonymity rather than a gimmick door. You simply have to know it is there, which is the oldest speakeasy trick of all, and still one of the most effective.
For three decades, Angel's Share was New York's best-kept secret: an unmarked door inside a Japanese restaurant in the East Village, opening onto a hushed, precise cocktail bar with strict house rules of seated guests only and no groups larger than four. Founded by Japanese immigrant Tony Yoshida, it was one of the bars that introduced Japanese bartending, its ceremony, its restraint and its hospitality, to America, and its Flirtibird is credited with bringing shochu cocktails to the city. After the original closed in 2022, Yoshida's daughter Erina revived it in 2023 at a new West Village address, carrying the ethos forward. It appears on North America's 50 Best Bars. It ranks nineteenth as a genuine pioneer, the hidden Japanese cocktail bar that shaped how a generation of American bartenders thought about craft and quiet. The move has not dimmed its influence; if anything, its reopening confirmed how much the city had missed the discipline it represents.
Walk into Da Vito, an ordinary working pizzeria in Paris's 11th arrondissement, head to the back and open the door of the walk-in fridge, and you are in Moonshiner, one of the city's original modern hidden bars. Behind the cold-store door is a 1920s-styled room of leather banquettes, wood panelling, low light and jazz, with a deep whisky focus of more than 80 bottles alongside a strong cocktail programme built around serves like the Goldie Manhattan. It ranks twentieth as a template for the Paris speakeasy: a genuine neighbourhood restaurant fronting a serious drinking den, with none of the queue-and-velvet-rope pretension that can afflict hidden bars elsewhere. Open late, every night, it has quietly outlasted many flashier imitators. The pizzeria-and-fridge routine is now much copied across Europe, but Moonshiner does it with an easy, unshowy conviction. You could genuinely walk in for a slice and never suspect the whisky bar waiting behind the refrigerator door.
Cahoots is less a hidden bar than a full theatrical world. Descend from Kingly Court in Soho into a meticulously built recreation of a disused 1940s London Underground station, complete with a replica Tube carriage, tiled platforms, period signage and costumed staff, and you are drinking in post-war, ration-book London, cocktails arriving in tin mugs, hip flasks and vintage milk bottles. Its backstory riffs on the after-hours parties said to carry on in abandoned Tube stations during the Blitz. It ranks twenty-first as the most fully immersive theme bar on this list: where most speakeasies hide a room, Cahoots hides an entire era, and few venues anywhere commit to a period fantasy so completely. It has since expanded into a second adjoining space, the Ticket Hall. It is more set-piece than serious cocktail den, and it knows it, but as an experience of walking through a door into another time, it is close to unrivalled in Europe. Pure escapist fun.
Almost every bar on this list is a modern homage to Prohibition. The Back Room is the real thing, one of only a couple of New York bars that actually operated as a speakeasy during Prohibition and still exist. On the Lower East Side, you look for a sign reading "Lower East Side Toy Company," slip down an alley and up a staircase into a room once known as the back of Ratner's, said in local lore to have hosted the likes of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Cocktails still arrive in teacups and bottled beer in brown paper bags, exactly as drinkers disguised them a century ago. It ranks twenty-second not for cutting-edge mixology but for authenticity no themed bar can manufacture: this is living history, a genuine surviving Prohibition room rather than a recreation of one. For anyone who wants to understand where the whole speakeasy idea came from, The Back Room is a pilgrimage, the origin story you can actually drink inside.
On an unmarked ninth floor in Nishi-Shinjuku, with no sign to guide you, Hiroyasu Kayama runs what may be the world's most extraordinary farm-to-glass bar. Bar Benfiddich is an apothecary made real: a back bar lined with house-made tinctures, herbal liqueurs, vermouths and more than a hundred absinthes, many built from herbs Kayama grows and forages on his family farm in Chichibu. There is no menu; he grinds fresh herbs with a terracotta mortar and pestle and builds each drink to order, part bartender, part grower, part alchemist. It reached No. 18 on The World's 50 Best Bars and No. 9 on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2025, and was named Best Bar in Japan that year. It ranks twenty-third as the most singular hidden bar in Tokyo, a sign-less room you would never find by accident, concealing a botanical practice no other bar on earth can replicate. To drink here is to watch a cocktail made from scratch, quite literally from the soil up.
Swift works on a clever two-in-one logic. At street level on Old Compton Street is a bright, quick aperitivo bar; pop in for a flawless Negroni, oysters and a filled roll, no reservation needed. Downstairs is the hidden half: a darker, candlelit whisky lounge holding hundreds of bottles and a late-night, destination-bar mood. Opened in 2016 by Bobby Hiddleston and Mia Johansson, both alumni of Milk & Honey, it carries that lineage's obsession with technique, and its Irish Coffee has become a genuine London institution. Swift has been a fixture on The World's 50 Best Bars, reaching No. 30 in 2022, and won Best New International Cocktail Bar at the 2017 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards. It ranks twenty-fourth for solving the speakeasy's central tension between exclusivity and welcome by offering both under one roof: walk in upstairs, descend into the secret downstairs. Few bars manage the casual and the appointment-worthy quite so gracefully, or so consistently.
Behind a plain door on Seventh Avenue South, down a staircase into a low-lit West Village basement, Little Branch keeps the Sasha Petraske flame burning. Opened in the mid-2000s by the Milk & Honey founder near where he grew up, it is a corrugated-tin-ceilinged room where you can order a flawlessly made classic or simply give the bartenders a few prompts and trust their dealer's-choice instincts, all hand-squeezed juice, hand-cut ice and exacting technique, with live jazz most nights and a cash-only, house-rules discipline. It ranks twenty-fifth as one of the last true keepers of the original speakeasy ethos: no spectacle, no theme, no gimmick door, just a hidden basement, great drinks and a room that has quietly trained many of the city's best bartenders. In an era of ever more elaborate hidden-bar concepts, Little Branch is a reminder of where it all began, and of how little a great speakeasy actually needs to be great.
A speakeasy has to be more than a hidden door. We weighted the quality and originality of the drinks most heavily, then the theatre and authenticity of the entrance, the bar's influence on the wider craft, and its record in independent awards such as The World's 50 Best Bars, Asia's and North America's 50 Best, the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards and the James Beard Awards. Accolades and dates cited above are drawn from those bodies' published results and reputable reporting, and we do not invent ratings. Bars move, evolve and occasionally close, so hours, entry policies and menus are worth confirming before you travel. Prefer your secrets a little less formal? Browse our companion guide to the 50 best hidden-gem bars in the world.