Best-of list · Bar Guide
How to get best seat at bar every time — James Harlow on reading the room, timing your arrival, and the 8 bars where seat position changes everything.
The short answer
8 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
Knowing how to get the best seat at a bar is a skill that takes roughly ten minutes to learn and improves every evening you spend in one. The best seat is not always the one with the best view or the most comfortable cushion. It is the seat that gives you access to the best service, the best conversation, and the right amount of control over your own evening. At every bar we have visited across 176 cities, the best seat follows the same basic logic.
The first principle of getting the best seat at a bar is to sit at the bar counter rather than at a table. When you sit at the counter, you are directly in the bartender's line of sight and social radius. You get served faster, you get recommendations more readily, and you become a participant in the room rather than an observer of it. At tables, you are a customer. At the bar counter, you are a regular in progress. This is the most important seat upgrade you can make at any bar, regardless of the city or the occasion.
How we picked
The formula for getting the best seat at a bar is not complicated. Sit at the counter. Arrive before 7pm. Position yourself near the service well or at the far end away from the door. If the counter is full, take the table nearest the bar on the deepest side of the room. Apply this framework at any of the eight bars in this guide and the experience will be materially better than whatever seat you would have defaulted to on arrival.
James has spent 13 years sitting at bar counters and has a near-photographic memory for which position at which bar produces the best evening. He never sits at a table if a counter seat is available.
Last reviewed 2026-03-19 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.