Best-of list · City Guide
Bar cities on the rise — the destinations building serious scenes right now. Medellín, Tbilisi, Nairobi, Athens, and more. Go before the prices catch up.
The short answer
8 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The most interesting bar cities right now are not the ones at the top of the global rankings — those lists document the present. The most interesting bar cities on the rise are the ones where the infrastructure is being built, the prices have not yet adjusted to reflect the quality, and the bartenders have the energy of people who are doing something for the first time rather than protecting a reputation. We track six of them below.
Athens has rebuilt its bar scene from the wreckage of the austerity years, and the result is one of Europe's most energetic cocktail cities. The bars that emerged from that period are characterised by a scarcity mentality that translated into creativity — bartenders who could not afford premium imported spirits built programmes around Greek ouzo, mastiha, and tsipouro, and discovered those spirits were more interesting than the imports they replaced.
How we picked
The bar cities on the rise share a common characteristic: they are building bar cultures around what they have rather than importing what they think they should have. Athens uses mastiha and tsipouro. Medellín uses aguardiente and tropical fruit. Nairobi uses Kenyan gin and East African botanicals. The result in each case is a cocktail identity that cannot be replicated anywhere else, which is the only sustainable competitive advantage a bar city can have.
Go now. Browse our full city directory for all 176 cities we cover, and check the most underrated bar cities for the cities that are already there but the world has not yet noticed. For a ranked look at which cities our editors are most excited about heading into the second half of 2025, see our annual most exciting bar cities 2025 feature — which overlaps with this list in several places but adds new entrants that have emerged since this article was published.
Marcus covers Latin America, the Pacific, and emerging bar cities globally. He has a particular interest in bar scenes built around local spirit traditions rather than imported cocktail culture, and has spent several seasons tracking Medellín, Athens, and Nairobi as they built their scenes from the ground up.
Last reviewed 2025-11-24 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.