The World's Top 50 Bars

Four Seasons at Chao Phraya River · ★ 4.8 (996 ratings) · Buenos Aires glamour on the river

Our No. 1 is the bar the crowd and the trade agree on. BKK Social Club leads our guest-rating ranking with a 4.8 average across nearly a thousand reviews, a remarkable score for a high-volume hotel bar, where an off night usually shows up fast. Bar manager Philip Bischoff, formerly of Singapore's Manhattan, built the room around the idea that Buenos Aires is a distant sister to Bangkok: soaring arches, a mirrored back bar, golden light and river terraces, with a menu of Places, People and Parties that turns Argentine history into drinks like the Evita and the caviar-topped Bananazo. The house runs on its own infusions and macerations, and it won the Michter's Art of Hospitality Award in 2022 for the welcome that explains the rating. It has ranked as high as No. 12 on The World's 50 Best Bars and No. 7 in Asia, pedigree that makes the guest verdict feel earned. Read the full review →

Cheongdam · ★ 4.8 (508 ratings) · Korean produce and a strict zero-waste programme

Statistically the equal of our No. 1, separated only by a smaller review base, Zest is the bar that proved sustainability and world-class drinks are the same project. Its name is a portmanteau of “zero waste,” and that is the operating system: founders Demie Kim, Sean Woo, Jisu Park and Noah Kwon make their own sodas, citrus stocks and spirits, upcycle every peel and off-cut, and even print menus on mandarin-orange compost. The minimalist Cheongdam room hides its bottles entirely, and an open prep lab lets you watch the work. The drinks are extraordinary: the Z&T is a from-scratch gin and tonic built on farm-picked botanicals; the Jeju Garibaldi uses whole oranges and carrots across juice, gin and cordial. Kim won the peer-voted Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award in 2024, and the bar was the highest new entry on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2023, later No. 9, and Best Bar in Korea three years running. Read the full review →

Bethnal Green · $$ · ★ 4.7 (1,184 ratings) · Taxidermy, hip hop, and a menu that changes daily

Satan's Whiskers is the anti-temple: a Bethnal Green neighbourhood bar with taxidermy on the exposed brick and old-school hip-hop on the speakers, where the cocktails happen to be among the best in Britain. The gimmick-free hook is a menu that changes every single day, drawn from a catalogue of some 900 drinks, with every juice squeezed fresh that morning, so the room rewards regulars and first-timers alike. Founded in 2013 by Kevin Armstrong, Damian Benjamin and Fraser Chapman, it trades on classic and modern-classic technique rather than theatre: drinks that are refreshing, never sweet, and stronger than they let on. The Morning Advertiser has named it the best bar in the UK three times (2019, 2023 and 2025), and it reached No. 29 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2024. Its 4.7 average across more than 1,100 reviews is the highest of any London room on our list, proof a laid-back local can out-rate the grand hotels.

Ebisu · $$$ · ★ 4.7 (889 ratings) · Absinthe and herbal liqueurs from a tiny corner room

Bar Trench is a 23-square-metre absinthe bar tucked in a back alley of Ebisu, and it has quietly shaped Tokyo's modern cocktail scene since 2010. Opened as a sibling to nearby Bar Tram, it fuses old-world European charm, dark timber, exposed brick, shelves of herbal liqueurs and cocktail lore, with Tokyo precision. Head bartender Rogerio Igarashi Vaz, a Brazilian-Japanese mixologist, is as much the draw as the drinks: guests single out his warmth as often as his skill. The menu runs to classics and originals built on absinthe and botanicals, with signatures like the Artichoke Julep and the Uplifted Morning Glory. Bar Trench has held a place on Asia's 50 Best Bars every year since 2016, climbing as high as No. 16 in 2018, and broke onto the global World's 50 Best Bars list in 2025. A 4.7 average across nearly 900 reviews reflects a room where hospitality and craft are given equal billing.

CBD · $$ · ★ 4.7 (851 ratings) · Guinness and martinis in a real Victorian cottage

Caretaker's Cottage is exactly what it sounds like: an actual 19th-century Victorian cottage in the middle of Melbourne's CBD, reborn in 2022 as a pub-like bar with world-class drinks and only 25 seats. The owners, Matt Stirling, Ryan Noreiks and Rob Libecans, carry some of the planet's best bars on their résumés, and they pour that pedigree into a deliberately unfussy room. The two signatures tell the whole story: a bracingly cold martini poured straight from the freezer with custom gin, and the best boilermaker in the country, that martini alongside a pint of Guinness. A rotating list of house cocktails changes monthly. The recognition has been immediate and serious: No. 19 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025, Best Bar in Australasia 2025, and the coveted Art of Hospitality Award in 2024. Its 4.7 guest rating shows a room where warmth, not spectacle, is the point, and drinkers feel it.

Eastern Paris · ★ 4.7 (636 ratings) · Art Nouveau room where the classics get rebuilt

Bar Nouveau translates an entire art movement into a cocktail bar. Opened in 2023 by Rémy Savage, one of the most acclaimed bartenders of his generation, formerly of London's Artesian, with Sara and Hadrien Moudoulaud and Marc Puzzuoli, it takes the visual and philosophical language of Art Nouveau and builds drinks around it. The tiny eastern-Paris room runs over two floors: a bright, mirror-ceilinged ground floor devoted to pre-industrial methods and restrained takes on the classics, served amid vintage glassware and floral detailing; and a darker basement of exposed brick where modern technique and controlled experimentation take over. The list is intentionally concise, a handful of drinks built to showcase precision rather than excess. Reviewers place it right up there with the world's best, and it features on Europe's 50 Best Bars. A 4.7 average across more than 600 reviews is remarkable for a room barely two years old, a debut that already feels permanent.

Barranco · ★ 4.7 (407 ratings) · Cocktails built on Peruvian produce and native botany

Lady Bee is Lima's argument that the world's most exciting pantry belongs behind a bar, not just in a kitchen. Opened in 2021 by Alonso Palomino and Gabriela León, whose CV includes Copenhagen's Noma, it channels Peru's extraordinary biodiversity into drinks and small plates, with rare Amazonian botanicals, rugoso lime and honey sourced directly from Amazonian producers. The name nods to two classics, the White Lady and the Bee's Knees, rebuilt with indigenous ingredients. The showpiece Three Sips Martini blends Cusco's Intira gin with sherry and dry vermouth, garnished with olive, salicornia, sea lettuce and Arapa trout caviar on a spoon carved from storm-felled Amazon wood. It won the Campari One To Watch Award at The World's 50 Best Bars in 2023 and climbed to No. 16 in 2024, and its sustainability work extends to reforestation. Now in a handsome Barranco space, it holds a 4.7 guest average, a small but devoted review base for a genuine destination.

Las Letras · $$ · ★ 4.6 (4,833 ratings) · Comic book neon and the famous Chipotle Chillon

Salmon Guru is a technicolor temple of creativity in Madrid's Las Letras, a comic-book fever dream where every detail feels intentional and mischievous at once. Opened in 2016 by the celebrated bartender Diego Cabrera with a stated mission to shake Madrid awake, it has become one of Europe's most original drinking destinations and grown into a global brand with outposts in Dubai and Milan. The famous Chipotle Chillón, mezcal, lemon, chipotle syrup and an absinthe mist, is the gateway drink, backed by inventions like the Mano de Dios, a fernet-cola reworked with lacto-fermented strawberry and balsamic. Cabrera builds around top Spanish produce, from Brandy de Jerez to Pedro Ximénez sherry. It ranked No. 23 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2024 and remains a fixture at No. 37 in 2025. Crucially for our list, it also carries a 4.6 average across more than 4,800 reviews, extraordinary consistency at genuinely high volume.

Centre · $$ · ★ 4.6 (4,739 ratings) · Greece's defining rum bar since 2009

Baba au Rum has shaped Athens's modern cocktail identity since 2009, and it remains the bar every drinks traveller is pointed to first. Founded by Thanos Prunarus, it calls itself a “rum and cocktail society,” a description earned by a back bar of more than 400 rums and a menu that ranges from classic tropical references to a modern, ingredient-driven style. The current list, titled “Love Letters to Future Selves,” runs to inventions like the Supremus n°58, a Ti Punch twist of rum blend, falernum, tea and summer fruit. Its consistency is remarkable: it has appeared on The World's 50 Best Bars for well over a decade, sat at No. 27 in 2025, and won the Rémy Martin Legend of the List Award in 2025 for that endurance. A 4.6 average across nearly 4,800 reviews confirms what the trade already knows, this is one of Europe's most reliably brilliant rooms, not a museum piece.

Sentrum · $$$ · ★ 4.6 (3,207 ratings) · Distills its own aquavit, gin and vodka in house

Himkok is a working distillery you can drink inside. From its Storgata home in central Oslo, it produces its own aquavit, gin and vodka on-site, roughly 70% of everything it serves is self-made, and grows the herbs for the bar in a purpose-built greenhouse, an almost total farm-to-glass loop that few bars on earth attempt. The result is a genuinely Nordic flavour you cannot get anywhere else. Its signatures lean on that house production: Birch, a modern icon, pairs Himkok Old Tom gin with meadowsweet, birch sap and a blue-cheese olive, while Fifth, Sage and Beta each showcase a different house spirit. It has been a World's 50 Best Bars member for six years, ranked No. 14 in 2025, and took the Best Bar Design Award in 2024. A 4.6 average across more than 3,200 reviews shows a room that pairs serious ambition with the warmth of a neighbourhood local, rare at this level.

City Center · $$$ · ★ 4.6 (3,122 ratings) · Theatrical serves inside the Hotel B Berdichevsky

Bellboy is theatre that happens to serve drinks. Set in the lobby of the chic Hotel B Berdichevsky since 2014, it wraps wine-velvet curtains, brass and a cosy 1920s aesthetic around cocktails served in deliberately absurd vessels, red fists, miniature bubble-filled bathtubs, conch shells, sometimes delivered by vintage baby carriage. Behind the staging is real craft: homemade infusions and tinctures drive drinks like the Rings a Bell, a tangle of gin, sauvignon blanc, Campari, lychee, grapefruit, cocoa balsamic and passion fruit. Local critics have called its cocktails the best, most original and wittiest in Israel, and a hidden mini-speakeasy called Butler seats a dozen guests for a quieter, classic experience behind a secret door. A 4.6 average across more than 3,100 reviews is unusually high for a bar this theatrical, proof the spectacle never comes at the expense of the liquid, which is exactly why it earns its place.

New Town · $$ · ★ 4.6 (2,570 ratings) · Barbershop front, serious whisky drinks behind

Panda & Sons hides one of the most technically inventive bars in Britain behind a fake Queen Street barbershop and a bookcase door. Founded in 2013 by Iain McPherson, it looks like a Prohibition lark, bow-tied staff, free popcorn, dim underground room, but the drinks are genuinely pioneering. McPherson, who came to bartending via gelato science in Italy, spent five years perfecting “switching,” a sub-zero technique that swaps ingredients into spirits, as in a coconut daiquiri where coconut milk is frozen into the rum itself. The signature Birdcage arrives under a glass dome full of cinnamon-clove smoke that lifts to reveal Johnnie Walker Gold, rhubarb shrub and Aperol. It is a regular on the world's cocktail-bar lists and a fixture of Edinburgh's scene. A 4.6 average across more than 2,500 reviews shows a rare thing: a bar doing serious R&D that still feels like pure fun to visit.

Roma Norte · ★ 4.6 (2,116 ratings) · A serious mezcaleria with ceremonial calm

Tlecan, Nahuatl for “place of fire”, is Mexico City's temple to agave, and it treats the country's native spirits with something close to reverence. On Avenida Álvaro Obregón in Roma Norte, the Anagrama-designed room is meant to feel like stepping into an ancient tomb: monochrome earthy materials, sparse dramatic lighting, mostly standing-room. Co-owner and head bartender Eli Martínez Bello sources bacanora, sotol, pox, raicilla and mezcal directly from craft producers across Mexico, then builds precise cocktails around them, the clarified Paloma Blanca, the Tascalate Sour drawn from a Chiapas cacao-and-corn drink, the Negroni Cacao. It is a bar for people who want to understand agave beyond tequila, poured by someone who knows the producers by name. Named No. 3 in North America and No. 20 in the world by 50 Best in 2025, it holds a 4.6 guest average across more than 2,100 reviews, ceremonial calm that drinkers clearly love.

Tanjong Pagar · $$$ · ★ 4.6 (1,777 ratings) · Magazine style menu at the Amara Hotel

Jigger & Pony turned the cocktail menu itself into a destination. At the Amara Hotel in Tanjong Pagar, its famous “menuzine” is modelled on Monocle magazine, styled photo shoots, illustrations, guest essays and recipes, and the team spends months researching each edition, the latest carrying more than two dozen cocktails, zero-proof options and sharing punches. Behind the design is world-class classic bartending: the yuzu whisky sour that made its name, a Singapore Sling given a smoky, tangy edge with lapsang souchong and rhubarb, and an Espresso Martini built on the bar's own coffee blend and a cacao tuile. The results speak for themselves, No. 5 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2024, No. 9 in 2025, and a top-10 fixture on Asia's list for seven years running, reaching No. 3 in Asia in 2025. Its 4.6 average across more than 1,700 reviews confirms a rare balance of concept and craft.

Holborn · $$$$ · ★ 4.6 (1,525 ratings) · Live jazz nightly under Gerald Scarfe's artwork

Scarfes Bar pairs live jazz seven nights a week with cocktails built around the imagination of one artist. In the Rosewood London on Holborn, its marble walls are hung with the caricatures of Gerald Scarfe, the British artist behind the animations for Pink Floyd's The Wall, and the drinks menu is themed on the facets of his subconscious, split into chapters titled Fears, Desires, Revelations and Transformations. From a velvet armchair you get jazz, soul and blues from 7pm to midnight and a room that reads as a proper grown-up London institution rather than a hotel afterthought. It was ranked No. 37 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2024, and guests consistently single out the atmosphere as much as the (not inexpensive) drinks. A 4.6 average across more than 1,500 reviews puts it among the most loved of London's luxury hotel bars, a place where the setting, the music and the liquid pull in the same direction.

Mayfair · $$$$ · ★ 4.6 (1,260 ratings) · The martini trolley still arrives at your table

The Connaught Bar is, by the numbers, the most decorated hotel bar in the world, it has appeared on The World's 50 Best Bars an unparalleled 16 times, including the No. 1 spot, and ranked No. 6 as recently as 2025. Its signature is a piece of theatre that has been copied everywhere and bettered nowhere: the black-lacquer Martini Trolley wheeled to your table, where a bartender stirs your chosen spirit with a house vermouth blend and a lineup of bespoke bitters, tailoring the drink to your palate. Agostino “Ago” Perrone has led the bar since it opened, and its Mayfair room is the template every modern hotel bar measures itself against. It is expensive and it is worth it. A 4.6 guest average across more than 1,200 reviews is striking for a bar operating at this altitude of price and expectation, the crowd and the trophies agree this is a benchmark.

Bang Rak · $$$$ · ★ 4.6 (1,190 ratings) · Jazz at the Mandarin Oriental since 1953

The Bamboo Bar was the first jazz bar in Bangkok, opened in 1953 at the Mandarin Oriental, and it remains an international legend, Louis Armstrong and Mick Jagger are among those who have passed through. Its riverside room in the hotel's Authors' Wing was carefully restored in 2014 by Thai firm P49 Deesign, keeping the rattan, bamboo and 1950s glamour while quietly modernising the space. Live jazz plays every night behind a strict no-shorts dress code, and the cocktail menu is themed on evolution, adaptable like the bamboo plant, with local-leaning crowd-pleasers such as a bee's knees with green mango and Thai chilli, and a mango-sticky-rice cocktail. This is our list's only entry filed under live music rather than cocktails, and deservedly so: the band is the point, the drinks are excellent, and the history is unmatched. A 4.6 average across nearly 1,200 reviews reflects a room that has stayed relevant for seven decades.

Galerie Vivienne · $$$ · ★ 4.6 (1,149 ratings) · Nico de Soto's jewel box behind Daroco

Danico is Nico de Soto's Paris jewel box, hidden inside the historic Galerie Vivienne, in a space that was once Jean-Paul Gaultier's boutique, and reached through the restaurant Daroco. De Soto is a genuine globe-shaker: he worked with the ECC group across Paris, London and New York, opened the acclaimed Mace in Manhattan, and was named among the world's most influential bartenders in 2014. That travel is the concept. His menus read like a logbook of discoveries from bars around the world, and many drinks celebrate Peruvian ingredients, the Leche de Tigre, built around a ceviche distillate, aji amarillo and coconut, is typical of the approach. The room itself is a high-ceilinged delight of quirky wallpaper, velvet and a herringbone-marble bar, staff in Gaultier-nodding nautical stripes, an '80s soundtrack overhead. Ranked No. 30 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025, it holds a 4.6 average across more than 1,100 reviews, often called simply the best cocktail experience in Paris.

Strand · $$$$ · ★ 4.6 (1,083 ratings) · Britain's oldest surviving cocktail bar

The American Bar at The Savoy is where London learned to love the cocktail. Opened around 1893, it is the longest-standing cocktail bar in the city, and its history is the history of the drink itself: Ada “Coley” Coleman, The Savoy's first female head bartender, invented the Hanky Panky here and served everyone from Mark Twain to Chaplin. The room is a piano bar in the grand sense, baby grand at its centre, marble pillars, black-and-white film stars on the walls, a mirror-backed bar, lively rather than hushed. Under Erik Lorincz it was crowned The World's Best Bar in 2017, confirming it as both keeper of the flame and a living, evolving room rather than a museum. This is the bar every cocktail history begins with, and it still pours to that standard. A 4.6 average across more than 1,000 reviews shows a 130-year-old institution that today's drinkers rate as highly as the scholars do.

French Quarter · $$$ · ★ 4.6 (836 ratings) · Creole cooking and classics in a 19th century cottage

Jewel of the South occupies an 1830s Creole cottage in the French Quarter, and it is a temple to New Orleans drinking culture built by one of its great custodians, co-founder Chris Hannah. The courtyard and wood-framed parlour rooms are a genuine oasis in the Quarter's bustle, and Hannah's drinks pay tribute to the city's history: an award-winning Brandy Crusta, his own French 75, a Sazerac deepened with Rancio Sec and Madeira. London-born chef Philip Whitmarsh runs a full Creole kitchen alongside, so this is a place for a whole evening. The recognition matches the ambition: at Tales of the Cocktail in 2022 it was named US Bar of the Year and Hannah Bartender of the Year, and it won the Art of Hospitality Award at North America's 50 Best Bars in 2024. A 4.6 average across more than 800 reviews reflects the warmth, this is a bar famous for turning strangers into friends.

Fitzroy · $$ · ★ 4.6 (732 ratings) · More than two decades at the top of Fitzroy

Black Pearl is the bar that helped build Melbourne's cocktail scene, and more than two decades on it is still the standard. Opened in Fitzroy in August 2002 by Tash Conte and her family, who started with little more than RSL bartending experience and a copy of 1001 Cocktails, it grew, entirely on the strength of the drinks, into a room that trained a generation of Australia's best bartenders. National and international recognition followed: a place on The World's 50 Best Bars from 2017 and Best International Cocktail Bar at that year's Spirited Awards, with the upstairs counterpart The Attic added in 2011. Melburnians never needed the awards to know where to go for a bloody good cocktail; the accolades simply told the travellers. A 4.6 average across more than 700 reviews confirms a rare thing, a pioneer that never coasted on its history, and still pours like it has everything to prove.

Central · ★ 4.6 (711 ratings) · Agave obsessed, three times Asia's best bar

COA is the bar that rewrote how Asia drinks agave. Opened in Central in 2017 by Jay Khan, named for the machete-like tool used to harvest agave, and inspired by the mezcalerias Khan visited in Mexico, it turned tequila and mezcal from party shots into a serious tasting culture, backed by a 41-page agave-spirits menu. The achievement is historic: COA was named The Best Bar in Asia in 2021 and 2022 and held the crown a third time, becoming the first-ever three-time winner, and reached No. 7 in the world in 2021. Its cocktails make agave approachable and thrilling at once, the Ancho Highball with salted plum and house guava soda, the savoury Bloody Beef Maria, the Bangkok-inspired Bitter Melon Collins. Warm, unpretentious and welcoming to all comers, it wears its expertise lightly. A 4.6 average across more than 700 reviews reflects a room as generous as it is authoritative, the rare specialist bar that never feels exclusive.

Ann Siang Hill · ★ 4.6 (614 ratings) · Singapore's history told through its drinks list

Nutmeg & Clove tells the story of Singapore through a glass. Founded in 2014 by industry veteran Colin Chia in the heritage enclave of Ann Siang Hill, named for the clove and nutmeg plantations that stood on Ann Siang Road in the 1800s, it reinterprets classic drinks and dishes with a distinctly Singaporean inflection, weaving in spices like coriander, laksa leaf, nutmeg and clove. The menu is structured as a journey through the island's history, divided into chapters such as Trading Post, Crown Colony, Banana Republic, Sovereign State and Metropolis, each a modern, local take on the classics. It is both a serious cocktail bar and a modern-Singaporean kitchen, which makes it a full evening rather than a single stop. Ranked No. 24 on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2025 and a debutant on The World's 50 Best Bars that year, it holds a 4.6 average across more than 600 reviews, heritage storytelling that drinkers genuinely love.

Shibuya · ★ 4.6 (589 ratings) · A Taisho era cafe reimagined as a modern bar

The Bellwood reimagines the café culture of late-Meiji and Taisho-era Japan, the moment Western and Japanese sensibilities first merged, and where the country's cocktail culture began. Opened in 2020 in Shibuya by award-winning bartender Atsushi Suzuki, its sepia photographs, wood-relief finishes and stained glass evoke exactly that vanished world. The drinks borrow from the kaiseki tradition, organised like courses, and blend Japanese and Western spirits with real wit: the Yakiniku Bloody with smoked vodka, wagyu fat and black garlic; a “G&T for Hipsters” infused with wasabi and cilantro and served in a ceramic vessel; the shiso-rimmed Shiso Caliente. An unmarked back counter, Bell Sushi, serves a twelve-piece omakase paired with cocktails. Ranked No. 48 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025, it earns its place through imagination rather than volume. A 4.6 average across nearly 600 reviews captures the consensus: as one guest put it, the Bellwood isn't trying to impress you, it just does.

Bugis · $$$ · ★ 4.5 (4,720 ratings) · An art deco gin tower of 1,300 plus bottles

Atlas is the most photographed bar in Singapore, and for once the spectacle is matched by the substance. Set in the soaring lobby of Parkview Square, the Art Deco “Gotham Building” in Bugis, it is built around an eight-metre gin tower holding more than 1,300 bottles from around the world, one of the largest gin collections anywhere, all under gleaming gold, bronze frescoes and Great Gatsby ceilings. Since opening in 2017 it has become a name every serious cocktail lover knows, a consistent presence on The World's 50 Best Bars and a winner of Tatler Asia's Best Design Award and the Rémy Martin Legend of the List Award. The menu is a love letter to the classics, gin and tonic, martini, gimlet, old fashioned, each given a touch of theatre, with a rose-gold Champagne Room stocking 240-plus labels alongside. A 4.5 average across more than 4,700 reviews is remarkable for a room this grand and this busy: the wow factor is real, and so is the liquid.

Pinheiros · $$ · ★ 4.5 (2,621 ratings) · Noodles up front, world class drinks alongside

Tan Tan is the only Brazilian bar on The World's 50 Best Bars main list, and it carries the flag with a half-and-half concept that blurs every line: bar and restaurant, Brazilian and Asian, in one intimate, buzzing Pinheiros room. It is the vision of chef-owner Thiago Bañares, who put Brazil on the global cocktail map, pairing inventive drinks with noodles, dumplings and deep-fried bar food like katsu sandos. The cocktails are flavour-led and proudly local: the Curupira mixes gin with Cambuci sparkling wine, mint and Brazilian vanilla; the Dr No blends rum with dry vermouth, green mate and orange bitters, with the list's narrative refreshed annually by head barman Caio Carvalhaes. It climbed to No. 24 in the world in 2025, up seven places year on year, and remains Brazil's sole representative for a second straight year. A 4.5 average across more than 2,600 reviews shows a room São Paulo has taken to its heart as much as the critics have.

East Village · $$$ · ★ 4.5 (2,088 ratings) · The modern speakeasy movement's flagship room

Death & Co is one of the birthplaces of America's craft-cocktail revolution, and its influence is stamped on bars all over the world. Opened on New Year's Eve 2006 in the East Village by David Kaplan and Ravi DeRossi, the name taken from a Prohibition-era temperance slur, it helped define the very format of the modern American cocktail bar: the dark, reservation-driven room with a long, considered menu and a barback of house infusions. It earned four consecutive years inside The World's 50 Best Bars top ten between 2009 and 2012 and originated modern classics such as the Naked and Famous. The menu is deep and the execution exacting; this is where the template was written. Now a mini-empire with outposts beyond New York, the original East Village room remains the reference point. A 4.5 average across more than 2,000 reviews shows a movement-defining bar that still delivers nightly, nearly two decades in, not resting on its considerable legacy.

The Rocks · ★ 4.5 (1,090 ratings) · Old Hollywood charm with Sydney polish

Maybe Sammy is a “hotel bar without a hotel”, a Rat Pack fantasy in The Rocks where Frank, Sammy and Dean would feel at home, and where the hospitality is as choreographed as a stage show. Bartenders perform routines, bubble guns burst mid-service, and every drink lands with theatrical flair, but the cocktails hold up to the spectacle: The Sammy riffs on the Roulette with gin and two vermouths, The Frank reworks the Old Pal with rye and Campari, The Dean pairs aged rum with Calvados and Swedish punch, alongside mini martinis and vintage-spirit pours. It was crowned The Best Bar in Australasia at The World's 50 Best Bars in 2023 and ranked No. 26 in the world in 2024, proof this is precision hospitality, not just fun. A 4.5 average across more than 1,000 reviews confirms the charm translates: a room engineered for delight that consistently delivers it.

Jumeirah · $$$$ · ★ 4.5 (1,042 ratings) · 1920s Osaka jazz age on the Dubai shoreline

Mimi Kakushi transports drinkers to 1920s Osaka, jazz on the air, colonial-era and oriental Art Deco detailing, the feel of a vintage private members' club dedicated to Japan's Roaring Twenties. Opened in 2022 at the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach, it is a restaurant and bar in equal measure, and regulars insist it pours some of the best martinis in the city. The cocktail programme leans hard into the jazz-age concept: each of its drinks is paired with a record, presented in a vinyl sleeve and matched to an emotion, so ordering becomes part of the theatre. The kitchen matches the ambition, from prawn-popcorn tempura to signature baked bone marrow with beef tartare. It ranked No. 36 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025 and has twice been named Dubai's best Japanese restaurant by Time Out. A 4.5 average across more than 1,000 reviews reflects a room where atmosphere, food and drinks are all pulling their weight.

1er · $$$$ · ★ 4.5 (777 ratings) · Paper roses and the Serendipity at the Ritz

Bar Hemingway is the most romantic bar in Paris, and one of the most storied anywhere. Tucked inside the Ritz with a history dating to 1921, it drew Cole Porter, Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald before it took the name of the writer who supposedly “liberated” it in 1944. Its modern legend is Colin Peter Field, the Englishman Forbes called the world's greatest bartender, who reopened the room in 1994 and made it his life's work, his philosophy that it is never about the cocktail, always about the person. His Serendipity, created that year from Normandy Calvados, bittersweet apple, fresh mint and Champagne, became a genuine new classic; he calls it “France in a glass,” and at its peak the Ritz went through nine bottles of Calvados a day making it. With just 34 seats, tables are precious. A 4.5 average across nearly 800 reviews reflects a tiny, historic room that rewards the pilgrimage.

$$$ · ★ 4.5 (443 ratings) · A bar hidden inside a working tailor's shop

Sastrería Martínez has one of the finest speakeasy entrances anywhere: you step into a working tailor's shop on a nondescript Lima street, and a tailor, tape measure in hand, shows you to a hidden door. Beyond it is a stunning Prohibition-themed room of booths and a glowing back bar, soundtracked by a live band playing Latin American classics. Opened in 2022, it is far more than its entrance. Diego Macedo brings two decades of international bartending to a list that pairs precise classics with signatures built on regional Peruvian liqueurs and distillates, Andean agave, pistachio-cream liqueur, the herbal Matacuy, alongside charcuterie, tartares and pizzetas for a full evening. It ranked No. 33 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025, a rapid rise for so young a bar. A 4.5 average across a smaller review base reflects a genuine hidden gem, the kind of room you have to be told about, and then never forget.

Azabu Juban · $$$ · ★ 4.5 (358 ratings) · Seasonal omakase cocktails, eight seats, no menu

Bar Gen Yamamoto is the most meditative cocktail experience in Tokyo, and arguably the world. Eight seats, no music, bare off-white walls, and a single vast counter carved from a bisected slice of Japanese oak, and behind it, Gen Yamamoto alone, building a tasting menu of four, six or seven cocktails as if preparing sushi. Each course is a hyper-seasonal creation of domestically sourced fruit and vegetables, served in its own glassware alongside a chosen flower, everything stirred and measured by eye. The menu changes constantly with what is in season, so no two visits are alike. A veteran of the New York scene and Tokyo's top bars, Yamamoto has turned the cocktail into something closer to a tea ceremony, hushed, precise, quietly profound. It is a small, expensive, unforgettable ritual rather than a night out. A 4.5 average across a deliberately tiny review base reflects exactly what it is: a bar for pilgrims, not passers-by.

El Born · $$ · ★ 4.3 (7,362 ratings) · Enter through the pastrami shop's fridge door

Paradiso is Barcelona's landmark cocktail bar, entered through a retro fridge door inside a working pastrami shop in El Born. Founded in 2015 by Tuscan-born Giacomo Giannotti, it was named The World's Best Bar in 2022, the summit of the global list, and it draws the largest review base on our entire ranking, more than 7,000 ratings, which is precisely why it sits this high despite a guest average a touch below its neighbours. That volume is the story: few bars on earth are visited, and loved, at this scale. The room curves with sea-inspired woodwork and Carrara marble nodding to Giannotti's Tuscan roots, and the drinks are theatrical showpieces, the Supercool Martini with fennel-and-oregano-infused gin, the Hidden Island of rum, carrot cake and coconut. It runs a no-reservations virtual queue, so expect to wait. A 4.3 average across 7,362 reviews is remarkable endurance for a bar this famous and this busy, fame that has not dulled the craft.

Old City · $$ · ★ 4.4 (6,160 ratings) · Three floors fed by Colombian farm ingredients

Alquímico is Colombia's great bar and one of the most purposeful on this list. Set across three floors of a 19th-century mansion in Cartagena's Old Town, it runs a different cocktail concept on each, all fed by its own farm-to-bar ecosystem. That ecosystem has a moving origin: when the pandemic forced the bar shut in March 2020, French-Vietnamese founder Jean Trinh sheltered 22 of his bartenders and their families on a farm in Filandia, 900km south, and the infrastructure they built there is now woven into everything the bar serves, as in the ground-floor Ajonjolí, a blend of whisky, sesame paste, orange and carrot cordial grown with local farming communities. Trinh won the Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award in 2022 for exactly this community-first ethos. It ranked No. 8 in the world in 2024 and No. 11 in 2025. A 4.4 average across more than 6,100 reviews confirms a bar Cartagena adores, craft with a conscience, at real scale.

Palermo · $$ · ★ 4.4 (3,685 ratings) · Loud, generous and proudly porteno

Tres Monos is punk-rock hospitality, a loud, neon-and-graffiti room in Palermo Soho that turns out to have some of the warmest, most serious service in the world. Opened in 2019 by Sebastián Atienza, Charly Aguinsky and Gustavo Vocke, it fuses street-style attitude with genuine craft: the team makes its own sake, a bourbon-style whiskey, loquat liqueur and Argentine wines from local grains and produce, as in the signature Vuelta Nah Manzana of house whiskey, homemade loquat liqueur and green apple. Complimentary vermouth shots and fresh water arrive the moment you sit. It ranked No. 7 in the world in 2024 and won the Art of Hospitality Award in 2023, official recognition of what regulars already knew about the welcome, and it runs a bartending school, Tres Monos Estudio, to raise Argentina's whole scene. A 4.4 average across more than 3,600 reviews shows a bar that is riotous fun and rigorous at once, which is a very hard balance to strike.

Lower East Side · ★ 4.4 (2,341 ratings) · Cold Pizza and Japanese Cold Noodle, in a glass

Double Chicken Please turns dinner into cocktails. Founded by GN Chan and Faye Chen, who spent a year touring the US serving drinks from a bright yellow 1977 VW minibus before settling on the Lower East Side in 2020, the back room, The Coop, deconstructs familiar dishes into liquid form. The famous Cold Pizza reassembles a margherita as a savoury margarita of Parmigiano Reggiano, burnt toast, tomato, basil honey and egg white; the Japanese Cold Noodle is just as audacious, and both land as clever rather than gimmicky. The front is a genuinely good fried-chicken counter, so the whole place is a two-part experience. Chan won the Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award in 2023, and the bar sits on both The World's 50 Best Bars and North America's list. A 4.4 average across more than 2,300 reviews shows a room where the concept and the craft reinforce each other, New York's most quietly influential new bar.

Juarez · $$$ · ★ 4.4 (2,019 ratings) · World's Best Bar 2024, exacting and clarified

Handshake Speakeasy made history: hidden behind a secret door in Colonia Juárez, it became the first Mexican bar ever named The World's Best Bar, taking the No. 1 spot on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2024 and holding No. 2 in 2025. Bar director Eric Van Beek has built a shrine to molecular mixology, using an on-site lab to clarify and refine the classics, a piña colada rendered clean and refreshing rather than sweet and heavy is typical of the approach, familiar drinks rebuilt with unexpected precision. The room is elegant and exacting, and the technical ambition is genuinely category-leading. It is worth noting the guest verdict is a shade cooler than the critics', some find the drinks more clever than crave-able, which is exactly why a rating-led list like ours places it here rather than at the summit. Still, a 4.4 average across more than 2,000 reviews for a bar this experimental is a real achievement.

Centro · $$$$ · ★ 4.4 (1,599 ratings) · A Renaissance palazzo with a lab in the cellar

Locale Firenze may have the most spectacular setting of any bar on this list. It occupies the Palazzo Concini, a 16th-century Florentine palace with foundations thought to reach back to Roman times, and a visit is a procession: through an ancient courtyard now serving as a lounge, past frescoed rooms and stone staircases, down to medieval underground cellars. The cocktail programme, led by Fabio Fanni, matches the surroundings with modernist technique and traditional Italian method, distillation, infusion, low-waste practice reinterpreting familiar flavours. The cellars also hide “Labo-ttega,” an avant-garde food-and-drink experience for up to four guests by reservation. It climbed to No. 22 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025, up from No. 36 the year before. A 4.4 average across more than 1,500 reviews confirms the experience delivers beyond the postcard: this is atmosphere and craft in equal, generous measure, Renaissance grandeur with a genuinely modern bar at its heart.

Shinjuku · $$$ · ★ 4.4 (930 ratings) · Hiroyasu Kayama grows his own botanicals

Bar BenFiddich is a botanist's alchemy lab hidden on the ninth floor of a West Shinjuku building, 15 seats, taxidermy owls, more than 100 absinthes in earth-dusted bottles, and Hiroyasu Kayama presiding over all of it. What sets it apart is the farm: Kayama grows juniper, wormwood, fennel, anise and more on his family's land in Saitama, 55 miles away, and distils them into house spirits, absinthe included. There is no menu. You tell Kayama what you like, and he builds to it, stirring a drink with a twig snapped fresh from a mizunara or juniper tree, muddling farm fennel into a Julep sipped through a century-old pewter straw, so no two visits repeat. It is one-of-a-kind, genuinely farm-to-glass mixology, ranked No. 18 in the world and No. 9 in Asia in 2025, and named Japan's best bar. A 4.4 average across more than 900 reviews reflects a singular, almost ceremonial experience that visitors travel a long way to have.

Old Street · ★ 4.4 (845 ratings) · Home of the One Sip Martini

Tayer + Elementary is two bars in one, opened on Old Street in 2019 by two of the most respected figures in the business: Alex Kratena, formerly of Artesian, and Monica Berg, who helped shape the Nordic cocktail scene. Elementary is the front, a genuinely welcoming neighbourhood room with pre-batched classics, beer, wine and coffee, no password and no dress code. Tayer is the back, a produce-driven bar built around a honeycomb-shaped island counter where bartenders work with almost culinary precision. Its One Sip Martini with a blue-cheese olive has become a rite of passage, offered in small, medium and large. Consistently ranked among the world's five best, No. 5 in 2025, it manages the near-impossible: Michelin-kitchen seriousness at £12–20 a drink, with none of the attitude. A 4.4 average across more than 800 reviews reflects a bar that lets you decide how deep to go, and rewards you either way, approachable and world-class at once.

SoHo · ★ 4.4 (728 ratings) · World's Best Bar 2025, cocktail popolari

Bar Leone is the reigning World's Best Bar, the first bar in Asia ever to take the No. 1 spot on The World's 50 Best Bars, crowned in Hong Kong in October 2025. What makes the win remarkable is how it was won: not with molecular fireworks but with the opposite philosophy. Rome-born Lorenzo Antinori, a veteran of top rooms in London, Seoul and Hong Kong, opened Bar Leone in Central in June 2023 around the mantra cocktail popolari, “cocktails for the people,” a deliberate step away from trend toward simplicity, warmth and drinks you can actually understand. The near-viral mortadella sandwiches and neighbourhood feel keep regulars coming back as much as the liquid. It debuted at No. 2 in 2024 before reaching the summit, and it is Antinori's third bar to hit No. 1, after the American Bar and Dandelyan. A 4.4 average across more than 700 reviews shows a democratic drinking den the crowd embraces as warmly as the jury did.

Palermo · $$$ · ★ 4.3 (4,720 ratings) · Saigon meets Paris in Buenos Aires

CoChinChina transports Buenos Aires to French Indochina. Named for the once-French-colonised region of Vietnam, it fuses both cultures, and it is the work of Inés de los Santos, effectively the godmother of the modern porteño cocktail scene, whose CV runs from the pioneering Gran Bar Danzón to her own drinks business, Julep. The Palermo room is a feast of detail: a U-shaped counter for thirty guests inlaid with more than a thousand crushed, lacquered eggshells in a traditional Vietnamese mosaic technique, and a much-photographed “wall of fish.” The drinks nod to France and Vietnam at once, the signature La Vida Que Me Merezco, a margarita balanced with pineapple, lemon and vanilla; the Blend de los Buenos with her own vermouth, soda and capers, alongside Franco-Vietnamese plates like shrimp banh-mi. It reached The World's 50 Best Bars within two years of opening, ranked No. 26 in 2025. A 4.3 average across more than 4,700 reviews reflects a genuine destination, if a busy and pricey one.

Monti · $$$ · ★ 4.3 (2,314 ratings) · Sci fi looks delivered with Italian precision

Drink Kong is Rome's most original bar, fronted by the city's cocktail king, Patrick Pistolesi. Its 300-square-metre Monti space looks like Blade Runner crossed with Japanese pop culture, divided into four worlds: the main bar, a softly lit lounge, the Jungle Room hosting live rock, jazz and soul, and an Omakase Room panelled in Japanese cherry-wood with caged alcoves of rare whisky and sake accessible only to key-holders by arrangement. It runs as an “instinct bar,” tell the team whether you want bitter, dry or sweet, and a drink is built to suit. Behind the neon-soaked theatre is real Italian precision, which is why it has become a fixture of the world's best-bar lists and one of the defining rooms of Rome's modern scene. A 4.3 average across more than 2,300 reviews reflects a genuine crowd-pleaser that never sacrifices craft for spectacle, a sci-fi fantasy that takes its liquid entirely seriously.

Ginza · $$$ · ★ 4.3 (470 ratings) · Hisashi Kishi's exacting basement counter

Star Bar Ginza is the pinnacle of the exacting Japanese bartending tradition, presided over since 2000 by Hisashi Kishi, the youngest-ever winner of Japan's national Scotch cocktail competition and a former world champion. Everything here is about precision made invisible. Kishi's “Ninja Ice” is hand-cut to such crystal clarity that it seems to vanish when viewed from the side of the glass; his signature hard shake, a vigorous figure-eight, aerates and chills at once, folding microscopic bubbles into a Sidecar until it turns silky and melts on the tongue. Yet for all the mastery, the hospitality is famously warm and accessible: Kishi believes guests should come for the person behind the bar, not the prestige. It is a small Ginza basement that rewards close attention. A 4.3 average across a smaller review base reflects a connoisseur's room, the kind of place bartenders themselves make pilgrimages to, to watch how it is supposed to be done.

Lower East Side · $$$ · ★ 4.2 (1,970 ratings) · No menu, in Milk & Honey's old room

Attaboy occupies hallowed ground: the original Lower East Side room of Milk & Honey, the speakeasy that launched the modern cocktail movement. When Milk & Honey moved uptown in 2012, its alumni Sam Ross and Michael McIlroy reopened the space as Attaboy, no sign outside, no menu inside, just 28 seats and bartenders who build drinks to your taste on the spot. The pedigree is written into the canon: Ross created the Penicillin and the Paper Plane here, McIlroy the Greenpoint, all now modern classics poured in bars worldwide. It was named the best bar in North America by The World's 50 Best Bars in 2022. This is bespoke bartending at its purest, in the room where the template was set. A 4.2 average across nearly 2,000 reviews is strong for a no-menu, hard-to-find bar that asks something of its guests, the slightly lower score partly reflects the wait and the mystery, both of which are the point.

Ginza · ★ 4.2 (792 ratings) · Hidetsugu Ueno and his hand carved ice

Bar High Five is the house of Hidetsugu Ueno, perhaps the most internationally celebrated bartender in Japan and one of the great ambassadors of Tokyo's craft. In a quiet Ginza basement opened in 2008, Ueno forgoes printed menus entirely: he draws out your mood and preferences in conversation, then builds a drink over ice he has hand-carved himself. That ice is the legend, his diamonds and blocks are cut with such precision that they control temperature and dilution to the degree, a discipline he has spent a career perfecting. The White Lady is a signature pour; the Japan-only Full Bloom blends maraschino and sakura liqueurs to taste. Ueno's global stature, including his judging role at Diageo World Class, has made this a bucket-list room, and it has featured on The World's 50 Best Bars for over a decade. A 4.2 average across nearly 800 reviews reflects an intimate, no-frills counter where the mastery is all in the glass.

Financial District · ★ 4.2 (752 ratings) · Cocktails 64 floors above the harbor

Overstory sits on the 64th floor of 70 Pine Street, one flight above the Michelin-starred SAGA, and its wraparound outdoor terrace delivers an uninterrupted 360-degree circle of the Manhattan skyline, genuinely one of the great views from any bar anywhere. But this is not a view trading on the view alone. The cocktail programme is seriously regarded, creative and balanced, and the kitchen sends up small plates from its acclaimed sister restaurants Crown Shy and SAGA, with the grilled cheese and duck taquitos singled out again and again. Getting there is part of the theatre: check in at street level, ride to SAGA, then get escorted up a final flight into an oval room with a disco ball. Drinks run $25–35, high but earned. It ranked No. 15 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2024. A 4.2 average across more than 700 reviews is solid for a destination this photographed, proof the liquid holds up against one of the best skylines on earth.

Ginza · $$$ · ★ 4.1 (188 ratings) · Kazuo Uyeda, inventor of the hard shake

Tender Bar is where the hard shake was born. Kazuo Uyeda, fiercely private, endlessly influential, opened it in Ginza in 1997 and is still behind the counter most nights, decades on. His global fame rests on the hard shake, a highly stylised three-piece-shaker technique that lets the ice roll rather than crash, which he says rounds off a spirit's edges and produces a colder, smoother drink; bartenders worldwide have spent careers trying to replicate it. Watching him work is the draw: he measures nothing, pours by eye, and shakes with the concentration of a surgeon, before serving what regulars call the best gimlet they will ever taste. For a high-end Ginza temple it is unusually welcoming, well suited to quiet conversation. Its 4.1 average comes from a very small review base, this is an intimate, under-the-radar room, but its place in cocktail history is enormous, which is exactly why it earns a spot on this list.

Eixample · $$$ · ★ 4.0 (1,737 ratings) · World's Best Bar 2023, the Drinkery House

Sips is one of the most awarded bars of the decade, named The World's Best Bar in 2023, and ranked No. 3 in the world and best in Europe as recently as 2025. Opened in 2021, during the pandemic, by Simone Caporale and Marc Álvarez, it arrived with formidable pedigree: Caporale led London's Artesian to four straight years as the world's best bar, while Álvarez spent nearly a decade with the Adrià brothers' elBarri group. Their idea reinvents the format, there is no bar to sit at. A small team mixes “haute-couture cocktails” from a central island using locally sourced ingredients, then brings them to your table, making the whole thing personal and theatrical across just 33 seats. It is a genuinely radical, critically adored room. We rank it here rather than higher precisely because our list follows guest ratings, and its 4.0 average, while the drinks are acclaimed, reflects a divisive, high-concept experience that not every visitor connects with. A fascinating case of critics and crowd diverging.

Secret address · Milan's hidden room, ask at MAG Cafe

1930 closes our list, and it is the only room here we rank on reputation rather than a public rating, because it is, by design, the most inaccessible bar in Milan. Hidden in the basement of sister venue Mag Café and run by the Mag family (Flavio Angiolillo, Marco Russo and head bartender Benjamin Cavagna), it is an invitation-only club with just 193 members able to book. Everyone else must charm their way in: have a drink at Mag, ask nicely, receive a number and a phone contact, then find the secret address, a tiny shopfront of waving golden lucky cats whose cabinet wall swings open once you give your name. Inside, bygone-era classics are executed flawlessly alongside genuinely 21st-century drinks that blur food and mixology. It ranked No. 43 on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2025. With no meaningful public rating for a members' room this secretive, its place is earned on craft and legend, the perfect note to end a list of the world's best on.