Best-of list · City Guide
The up and coming bar neighbourhoods of 2024 across New York, London, Tokyo, and beyond. Where serious drinkers should be going before everyone else.
The short answer
7 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
The best bars in 2024 will not all be in the neighbourhoods where the best bars were in 2023. Bar culture migrates — chefs and bartenders follow affordable rents, creatives cluster in the same postal codes, and within two years a formerly unremarkable street becomes the city's most interesting drinking destination. Our editors have been tracking the up-and-coming bar neighbourhoods that are about to break through. These are the ones to know before the queues arrive.
New York's established bar neighbourhoods — the West Village, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg — remain excellent. But the most interesting openings of the last 18 months have been happening elsewhere. Ridgewood in Queens has accumulated a dozen genuinely serious bars in three years. Crown Heights in Brooklyn has a cocktail bar scene that rivals Carroll Gardens from five years ago. These are not fringe claims; they are where the bartenders who used to work in the West Village are opening their own places.