Best-of list · Bar Guide
Members' club bars promise exclusivity and quality. Here's an honest assessment of whether the annual fee delivers — and which clubs have earned.
The short answer
6 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The private members' club has expanded considerably since Soho House normalised the format for a younger, creative-industry audience in the 1990s. What was once a small, opaque network of London institutions with decades-long waiting lists is now a global category with dozens of clubs competing for annual fees. Whether any of them are worth it depends almost entirely on what you are buying — and whether the bar is actually good.
The members' club pitch rests on three propositions: access control (no civilians), community (people like you), and facilities (a bar you can always get a table at). The first proposition has weakened significantly as clubs have scaled — a Soho House with 4,000 members in a single city is not the same proposition as the original Dean Street house with 300. The second proposition varies enormously by club. The third is the most consistently delivered, and for people who entertain regularly or live in cities where finding a table is genuinely difficult, it has real value.