Best-of list · City Guide
The best happy hour bars in Los Angeles, from Silver Lake to West Hollywood. Our editors pick where to drink well before 7pm — real bars, real.
The short answer
9 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
Los Angeles doesn't have a compact bar neighbourhood the way London or New York do, which makes finding the best happy hour bars in Los Angeles an exercise in knowing where to look. The city's bar scene is distributed across neighbourhoods that are each fifteen minutes apart by car, each with their own character and price points. Our editors covered Silver Lake, West Hollywood, Downtown, and the Westside to find the happy hours actually worth building a pre-dinner plan around.
Downtown Los Angeles has developed into a genuine bar destination over the past decade, with the Arts District and Broadway corridor producing some of the city's most interesting cocktail programmes. These are the Downtown picks for the pre-dinner window.
How we picked
Los Angeles happy hours require planning in a way that more compact cities do not — the geography means you need to decide which part of the city you're anchoring to before choosing your bar. Our recommendation: pick your neighbourhood first and your bar second. Silver Lake and Los Feliz give you the best value with the longest windows; Downtown gives you the most serious cocktail programmes in the pre-dinner hour; West Hollywood gives you the setting to match the occasion. The Varnish and Bourbon & Branch (in SF, but comparable) represent the LA speakeasy category at its best.
Book ahead for The Varnish and Bar Ama; both have limited capacity and the earlier end of their happy hour fills with pre-dinner diners from the surrounding restaurants. Everything else on this list is first-come, though Thirsty Crow's back patio occasionally has wait times on warm weeknights.
Marcus covers the West Coast bar scene with a particular interest in how cities' drinking cultures reflect their characters. He splits his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has opinions about tiki bars he will share without prompting.
Last reviewed 2026-05-16 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.