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Savoy Hotel
The American Bar at the Savoy, London
London's original cocktail bar has been pouring since 1893, and it is the right place to start any drinking trip through the city. Ada Coleman became head bartender here in 1902 or 1903, depending on the account, and is credited with creating the Hanky Panky for the comic actor Charles Hawtrey: gin, sweet vermouth and a bitter streak of Fernet-Branca. It was the only drink Harry Craddock credited to her in The Savoy Cocktail Book, and ordering it at the bar where it was born is the whole point of the visit. The room is polished and formal, the prices match the address, and the sense of a century of bartending behind the counter is something no new bar can fake.
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The Connaught (hotel)
Connaught Bar, The Connaught, London
The youngest of the grand London hotel bars here, open since 2008, but it has already outlasted the fashions around it. The draw is the martini trolley: it rolls to your table and your martini is mixed to your taste right there, turning a simple drink into a small performance. Ago Perrone has led the bar for almost its whole life, and it has appeared on nearly every World's 50 Best Bars list since it opened, which says more than any single year's rank. Book ahead, dress for Mayfair, and order the house martini before exploring the menu.
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Dukes Hotel
Dukes Bar, Dukes Hotel, London
A small room in St James's that has made the martini its whole personality. The trolley comes to you and the drink is mixed at the table, strong and very cold, which is why the bar has long been said to limit guests to two. Ian Fleming was a regular, and the Bond connection is part of the fun: a Vesper here feels like the right order rather than a gimmick. Alessandro Palazzi, who arrived in 2007 after years at the Ritz and the George V in Paris, built the bar's modern reputation around that trolley. Come for one drink before dinner and take the limit seriously.
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Harry's New York Bar
The Paris bar that taught Europe to drink like an American, open since 1911 at 5 Rue Daunou, between the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Rue de la Paix. The jockey Tod Sloan turned a bistro into the New York Bar, and the name still tells you what it was for. Harry's is credited as the birthplace of the Bloody Mary, the French 75, the Sidecar and the Monkey Gland, though other bars dispute some of those claims, the King Cole Bar in New York among them. Settle the argument your own way: order a French 75 in Paris and compare it with every version you have had at home. It suits a lively early evening drink more than a quiet one.
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Hôtel Ritz Paris
Bar Hemingway, Hôtel Ritz Paris
A cozy boudoir of a bar that is nearly buried under Hemingway paraphernalia: photographs, manuscripts, safari trophies and even his old typewriter. It could easily be a theme bar, but the drinks keep it serious. Colin Field ran it from 1994 until he retired in 2023 and made it famous for cocktails mixed to the guest rather than read off a menu, and Anne-Sophie Prestail, who had worked beside him since 2006, took over from him. It is small, so arrive early, sink into a leather armchair and let the bartender choose. Few hotel bars anywhere feel this personal.
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Harry's Bar (Venice)
Giuseppe Cipriani opened this small Venice bar in 1931, and Italy's Ministry for Cultural Affairs declared it a national landmark in 2001. The reason to go is the Bellini, puréed white peaches topped with Prosecco, which Cipriani is credited with inventing here sometime between the mid-1930s and 1948 and named after the painter Giovanni Bellini, whose pinks the drink's color recalled. The prices are famously steep, but drinking the original in the city that gave it its name is worth the bill once. Treat it as a single, unhurried drink rather than a night out, and go at an off hour if you want a seat at the bar.
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Camparino in Galleria
Milan's aperitivo starts here, at the mouth of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II with the Duomo across the square. Davide Campari opened the bar in 1915 as the younger brother of his father's café, and it was the city's first bar di passo: you stand at the counter, drink quickly and move on. That is still the best way to use it. Order a Campari Seltz at the ground-floor bar, which has been served here since the start, and you get the ritual in its original form for a fraction of what a table costs. Come back for a Negroni at dusk if you want to sit and watch the Galleria fill up.
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Bar Basso
The story goes that the Negroni Sbagliato was born here when the owner, Mirko Stocchetto, reached for spumante instead of gin. Sbagliato means mistaken, and that mistake has been the house drink ever since. Ask for it in one of the enormous stemmed chalices Stocchetto designed himself, glasses so big they look like a joke until you are holding one. Bar Basso is a neighborhood bar rather than a grand one, little changed since the late 1950s, and the family still runs it as a living museum of Milanese bar culture. It pairs naturally with the Camparino: the classic aperitivo in the Galleria, then the happy accident across town.
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American Bar (Vienna)
Loos American Bar, Vienna
Adolf Loos designed this tiny bar off the Kärntner Strasse in 1907 and 1908, and it is a piece of modernist architecture you can order a drink in. The room is only about six meters deep and under 30 square meters, but cleverly placed mirrors make it look four times larger, mahogany paneling lines the lower walls, and a wall of softly backlit onyx glows over the door. Take a seat in one of the green leather booths and the illusion works on you all evening. It gets crowded quickly, so go early or late, order a classic, and enjoy a room that has barely changed in more than a century.
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Schumann's Bar
Charles Schumann learned his trade at Harry's New York Bar in Munich, then opened his own American Bar on Maximilianstrasse in 1982 and made it the reference point for serious cocktails in Germany. It now sits on Odeonsplatz at the edge of the Hofgarten, and it marked 40 years in 2022. The appeal is a grown-up bar that has never chased trends: classic drinks made precisely, a wall of bottles behind the counter, and a crowd that comes as much for the room as the menu. Order a sour or a martini and watch how calmly the bar runs on a busy night. The small Camparino next door suits a quieter aperitivo first.
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Boadas
Barcelona's oldest cocktail bar is a tiny triangular room a few steps off La Rambla, and it is a direct line back to Havana. Miguel Boadas learned his trade at the Floridita before opening here in 1933, and his daughter María Dolores took over in 1967. Bartenders in black jackets and bow ties made their name by throwing drinks from one tin held high into another far below, a show that turns a simple order into theater. Go for a daiquiri or an Old Fashioned and stand at the bar rather than waiting for a seat. It is the antidote to the Rambla crowds outside.
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Bemelmans Bar
The murals are the reason this Carlyle hotel bar feels like nowhere else in New York. Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the Madeline books, painted them in 1947 in exchange for lodging for himself and his family, and they show Central Park through the seasons, with Madeline herself making a cameo. They are the last of his commissioned wall paintings on public view. Add nightly piano and late-night jazz and you have the most romantic room for a martini in Manhattan. A cover charge applies once the music starts in the evening, so come in the afternoon for the murals alone, or stay late and make the cover part of the night.
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St. Regis New York
King Cole Bar, The St. Regis New York
This is the New York half of the Bloody Mary story. Fernand Petiot, who is said to have mixed an early version at Harry's in Paris, claimed to have perfected the modern vodka, tomato and spice combination here in 1934, and he certainly popularized it. The owner, Vincent Astor, made him rename it the Red Snapper because the original name was thought too crude for the St. Regis. Others claim the drink too, so take the story as the bar tells it. Over the bar hangs Maxfield Parrish's mural of Old King Cole and his fiddlers three, which dominates the small, high-ceilinged room. Order the house Bloody Mary at midday, look up at the mural, and you have a piece of cocktail history Paris cannot give you.
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Death & Co.
A modern bar that earns its place by changing how the world drinks. Death & Co opened on New Year's Eve 2006/07 in the East Village and quickly became a cocktail institution, one of the rooms that defined the craft cocktail revival with a long menu made up entirely of its own drinks. Its first book, Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails, has been called the most important and influential book to come out of the craft cocktail movement. The group now has bars in other cities, but the East Village original is the one to visit. Order from the current menu rather than asking for a classic: inventing new drinks is what made its name.
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The Roosevelt New Orleans
The Sazerac Bar, The Roosevelt New Orleans
The bar takes its name from the city's signature drink, and this is the place to order one: rye, sugar and Peychaud's bitters with a hint of lemon and licorice. Paul Ninas's murals of well-dressed New Orleans society line the walls, giving the room the poise of a grand hotel bar without the stiffness. The Ramos Gin Fizz, creamy, floral and shaken hard for its foam, is second only to the Sazerac in popularity here. The legend goes that in 1935 Huey Long loved it so much he had the hotel's head bartender come to New York to show the bar at the Hotel New Yorker how to make it. Have one of each, slowly.
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Hotel Monteleone
Carousel Bar & Lounge, Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans
The only bar here that moves. The counter is a working carousel that started turning in 1949 and has not stopped, completing a full rotation every 15 minutes under a lit, painted canopy, with stools styled like fairground animals. It sounds like a gimmick until you are sitting at it, drink in hand, watching the French Quarter room slide past. Order a Vieux Carré, the rye, cognac and vermouth classic linked to the Monteleone, and pace it to one or two turns. Seats at the carousel go fast, especially with live music seven nights a week, so be ready to wait in the lounge.
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The Buena Vista
Irish coffee came to America at this corner bar at Hyde and Beach Streets, near Fisherman's Wharf. On the night of November 10, 1952, owner Jack Koeppler challenged travel writer Stanton Delaplane to help him recreate the drink served at Shannon Airport, and the bar has been making it ever since, up to 2,000 a day. That volume is the show: glass after glass built at speed, hot, sweet and topped with cool cream. This is not a quiet cocktail den. It is loud, cheerful and full of visitors, and that is part of the fun. Take a stool at the bar on a foggy afternoon and drink the original where it was perfected.
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Musso & Frank Grill
Hollywood's oldest restaurant has been serving since 1919, and its bar is where Los Angeles still goes for a proper martini. This is the room where scripts were discussed over a famous Musso's martini, Raymond Chandler wrote chapters of The Big Sleep over drinks in the Back Room, and William Faulkner went behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps. GQ once named it the best place in America for a martini, and the house stirs it rather than shaking it. It is a restaurant first, so come for an early evening drink at the bar, then decide whether to stay for dinner.
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Hussong's
The oldest cantina in Baja California has been pouring in Ensenada since 1892, when the German immigrant John Hussong opened it, and it still occupies its original building. It is also one of several bars that claim the margarita. The story goes that bartender Carlos Orozco mixed the first one in October 1941 and named it after Margarita Henkel, the daughter of the German ambassador. Other bars tell their own versions, and none has been proven, so treat it as a legend you can taste. The appeal is an old cantina with no polish and no pretense, a world away from the grand hotel bars elsewhere on this list. Order the house margarita and keep it simple.
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Raffles Hotel
Long Bar, Raffles Hotel, Singapore
Raffles credits the Singapore Sling to the Hainanese bartender Ngiam Tong Boon, who is said to have first mixed it here in 1915, and it is now treated as the country's unofficial national drink. The two-story bar is styled on Malayan life in the 1920s, and it keeps one ritual you will find almost nowhere else in tidy Singapore: guests brush peanut shells off the bar and onto the floor. The Sling is sweet, pink and pricey, and purists will say there are better cocktails in the city. That misses the point. Order one, crack a few peanuts, and you have done something a visitor can only do here.
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Bar High Five
The place to see Japanese bartending at its most exacting. Hidetsugu Ueno trained at Ginza's Star Bar before opening his own small bar in 2008, and High Five has no menu: tell the bartender which spirits and flavors you like and the drink is built for you. Ueno's ice carving is famous in its own right, and watching a clear block shaped by hand is as much the experience as the cocktail. The bar is a small basement in Ginza, and its fame means it is often busy. Arrive early, be patient, and leave the choosing to the bar. It is a lesson in precision you cannot get at home.
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