Best-of list · City Comparison
New York vs Los Angeles bars compared by our editors. Cocktails, rooftops, natural wine, and late night — which coast wins? We pick a winner, bar by bar.
The short answer
8 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The new york vs los angeles bars debate is less settled than people think, and I have skin in it. I live in LA. I go to New York four times a year specifically for bars. The honest truth is that these cities have different strengths and the right answer depends entirely on what you are looking for. New York wins on craft and density. Los Angeles wins on outdoor drinking, natural wine, and the ease with which a good bar integrates into a good evening. Here is the category breakdown with the bars that make each city's argument.
Los Angeles has significantly closed the gap on New York cocktail culture in the past five years. The Silver Lake and Downtown clusters now produce programs that would have been unimaginable in LA a decade ago. But New York still has more bars at the top end of technical excellence, and the culture around those bars is more serious. For cocktails specifically, New York still wins.
How we picked
New York wins on cocktail excellence, late night, density, and the kind of bar culture where you can walk from one great bar to the next without a car. Los Angeles wins on outdoor drinking, natural wine, rooftops, sunshine, and the overall quality of life that surrounds the drinking. Both cities have bars that belong on any serious drinker's lifetime list.
My honest recommendation: go to New York in the autumn and spend three days in the East Village and Lower East Side. Go to LA in March and spend two evenings in Silver Lake and one on a rooftop in West Hollywood. Neither trip will disappoint you if you know where to go, and this article exists so that you do.
Marcus covers West Coast bar culture and splits his time between Silver Lake and Downtown Los Angeles. He visits New York four times a year specifically for the cocktail bars and still thinks LA wins on rooftops.
Last reviewed 2026-05-19 · The editors recheck hours and closures against current local coverage.