Best-of list · City Guide
The best bars in Las Vegas — beyond the casino floors. Our editors cover the Strip, Downtown, and the Arts District for serious drinkers visiting Vegas.
The short answer
10 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The best bars in Las Vegas are not the ones on the casino floor with no windows and servers who vanish after your first round. The city has developed a serious drinking culture over the past fifteen years — partly on the Strip, mostly off it — and if you know where to look, you can drink as well here as you can anywhere in the country. We've looked. Here's what we found.
Las Vegas is one of the few cities in America where you can find a $40 cocktail and a $8 cocktail that are both genuinely worth their price. The contrast is part of what makes it interesting. The Strip bars operate at a different scale to everywhere else; the Downtown bars operate at a different frequency.
How we picked
Las Vegas rewards the drinker who does their research before arriving. The city is designed to capture your attention at every turn — and the bars that benefit most from that are the ones that don't deserve your time. Go to the Chandelier for the Strip experience done right. Go to Downtown Cocktail Room and Herbs & Rye for the city that Las Vegas residents actually drink in. Leave the tourist bars to the tourists.
If you only have one evening to work with, our one-night Las Vegas bar itinerary maps the optimal sequence — Strip cocktails at 7pm, Fremont East by 10pm, and the speakeasies that open late. It is the most efficient way to cover all three bar cultures in a single evening.
James has been covering US bar scenes for barsforKings since 2019. He has a particular interest in cities that shouldn't have good cocktail bars but do anyway — Las Vegas qualifies on most visits.
Last reviewed 2025-11-28 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.