Best-of list · Deep Dive
The bars featured in novels and literature worth visiting today. From Hemingway's Paris haunts to the Dublin pubs in Joyce — real bars that shaped.
The short answer
8 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The bars featured in novels earned their place on the page the same way great bars earn their place in a neighbourhood — by being specific, by having a particular atmosphere that cannot be replicated anywhere else, and by attracting the kind of people whose company makes for compelling material. These are the real rooms that produced real literature.
Ernest Hemingway turned Paris's bars into literature so effectively that it became impossible to separate the city's drinking culture from his prose. The bars he wrote about in A Moveable Feast still exist. Most of them still serve the same drinks. All of them carry the weight of what was written there.
How we picked
The bars that made it into literature did so because they were specific — specific in atmosphere, in clientele, in what they served and how they served it. La Closerie des Lilas in Paris and Mulligan's in Dublin are our top recommendations for those who want the full weight of literary history in a room that still functions as a working bar.
We also rate the White Horse Tavern in New York for anyone building a Greenwich Village afternoon around literary geography. Pair it with a walk to Chumley's on Bedford Street and you have covered the most important square mile in twentieth-century American literature.
Sofia has spent a decade mapping the literary bars of Europe — from Hemingway's Paris haunts to the Dublin pubs of Ulysses. She drinks Burgundy in the places Hemingway described and takes notes.
Last reviewed 2026-01-15 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.