Best-of list · Sports Guide
The best bars to watch NFL games across New York and Chicago. Our editors cover the sports bars that get the Sunday experience right — screens,.
The short answer
8 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The best bars to watch NFL games are the ones that treat Sunday as a proper event rather than an excuse to pack in customers. We've been to enough mediocre sports bar Sundays — rooms with sound turned up to compensate for bad speakers, beer service that disappears at kickoff, screens positioned for the bar staff rather than the customers — to know that finding a good NFL viewing bar takes more than finding one with a TV. This is the shortlist.
New York's NFL viewing scene is complicated by the city's lack of a local team playing at home — which means the best sports bars in the city have developed a more neutral, football-first culture than you'll find in single-team cities. These bars show every game simultaneously and serve the full Sunday slate properly.
How we picked
The bars that get NFL Sunday right are the ones that have structured their operations around it — a kitchen that keeps pace with the 1pm, 4pm, and 8pm windows, a sound setup that lets you follow your game without shouting at the person next to you, and table management that doesn't pack the room so tight that service collapses at kickoff. The bars on this list have all figured these things out. Book ahead for Sunday games, walk in for weeknight windows.
James has covered the New York and Chicago NFL bar scenes through multiple seasons and has a clear ranking system: screens first, sound second, service third. Everything else is secondary. He also has a pick for every game day — ask him about it.
Last reviewed 2026-03-04 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.