The World's Best Hotel Bars: Where Legendary Cocktails Meet Iconic Settings

A great hotel bar is a specific and rare thing. It is not the most elaborate bar in the city, nor the one with the longest cocktail list, nor the one that has received the most design awards. A great hotel bar is a place where the room, the service, the drink, and the moment converge into something that could only happen in that specific location — a bar that is inseparable from its hotel and from its city, that accumulates the weight of its own history, and that produces an experience you will mention years later to people who have never been. There are not many of them in the world. These are the ones worth knowing.

In This Guide

• London: The Benchmark
• Paris: Theatre & Legend
• New York: Intimacy & Myth
• Asia: Ritual & Spectacle
• Marrakech: Churchill's Bar
• What Makes a Hotel Bar Legendary
• FAQs

London: The Benchmark

London has more great hotel bars per square mile than any other city — and the concentration of exceptional bars in Mayfair specifically (The Connaught, Claridge's, The Ritz, Dukes, The Dorchester, all within a 15-minute walk of each other) constitutes what is arguably the finest hotel bar district in the world. The London hotel bar tradition is distinct from the cocktail bar tradition: these are not bars built around the skills of individual bartenders or around a particular spirits category. They are bars built around a sense of occasion, formality, and accumulated time — where the point is not just the drink but the room you are drinking it in and the particular ceremony of being served.

The Connaught Bar — The Connaught, London

Named the World's Best Bar by the World's 50 Best Bars awards twice — the only hotel bar to have achieved this in the history of the program — the Connaught Bar operates at a level that the rest of the industry uses as its reference point. The Art Deco room designed by David Collins, with its silver-leaf ceiling and the signature trolley service at which a tableside martini ritual is performed with near-ceremonial precision, produces what has become the world's most imitated hotel bar experience. The martini here — assembled at your table from a selection of spirits and vermouth you choose, made to your specification with an attention to temperature and dilution that most bartenders cannot replicate — is not just the best hotel cocktail in London. It is among the best drinks in the world. Preferred partner booking through WhataHotel! includes access to The Connaught's preferred table reservation list for hotel guests.

Dukes Bar — Dukes London

Before the Connaught, before the cocktail bar renaissance, Dukes Bar in St. James's was the address for London's most serious martini — and the claim, long repeated and never definitively refuted, that Ian Fleming drank here and incorporated the tableside martini service into James Bond's famous "shaken, not stirred" specification. Alessandro Palazzi, the bar's longtime head bartender, has become one of the most celebrated figures in London's drinks culture for his absolute insistence on the primacy of the martini and his refusal to serve multiple rounds — the martinis at Dukes are so cold and so concentrated that two, in the bar's official estimation, is the appropriate maximum. The bar itself — small, hushed, club-like — is the antithesis of the high-profile cocktail bar, which is exactly why it has outlasted every trend of the past forty years. Preferred partner perks available at Dukes London.

The American Bar — The Savoy, London

The oldest surviving cocktail bar in the United Kingdom — open since 1893 — and the bar where more of the canonical cocktail history happened than perhaps any other in the world. The American Bar's head bartenders have included Ada Coleman (who invented the Hanky Panky in 1903) and Harry Craddock (who wrote The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930, the text that defined the classic cocktail canon). The current room — with its black-and-white vintage photographs, the Art Deco interiors, and the extraordinary view of the Savoy's Thames-facing entrance — is both a working bar and a piece of living cocktail history. Preferred partner perks available at The Savoy.

Claridge's Bar — Claridge's, London

In the hotel that has hosted more European royalty and world leaders than any other in London, the Claridge's Bar — an Art Deco room with a champagne menu that is one of the most extensive in the country — operates as the social center of a building that has barely changed since its 1930s heyday. The bar's clientele, which has always skewed toward the creatively successful rather than the merely wealthy, creates an atmosphere that no amount of interior design can manufacture: a room where people genuinely want to be, dressed as if it matters, at a hotel that treats the act of having a drink as an occasion worth the ritual. Preferred partner perks available at Claridge's.

Paris: Theatre & Legend

Bar Hemingway — Hotel Ritz Paris

No hotel bar in the world carries more literary mythology than Bar Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was a regular at the Ritz during the inter-war years, reportedly helped "liberate" the bar himself at the Liberation of Paris in 1944, and is said to have drunk his first celebratory drink here with a group of resistance fighters. Colin Peter Field, the bar's longtime head bartender and one of the most celebrated in Paris, has preserved a room that functions as a museum of Hemingway-era Paris memorabilia while producing cocktails — particularly his signature Serendipity — that would merit the pilgrimage entirely on their own terms. The bar is small, dark, crowded, and almost impossible to get into without a hotel reservation. Preferred partner perks available at Hotel Ritz Paris.

Le Bar — Four Seasons Hôtel George V, Paris

The George V bar — accessed through some of the most extraordinary flower arrangements in Paris, which the hotel's head florist creates and changes seasonally throughout the public spaces — is the bar that represents Paris at its most opulent and unapologetically grand. The room, with its tapestries, marble, and the hushed intensity of a genuinely exclusive space, attracts the fashion and art world that gravitates to the 8th arrondissement for exactly this kind of high-maintenance splendor. The cocktail list is exceptional; the champagne selection is among the most significant in the city. Preferred partner perks available at Four Seasons Hôtel George V.

New York: Intimacy & Myth

Bemelmans Bar — The Carlyle, New York

The most beloved hotel bar in New York — and the competition is significant — Bemelmans Bar takes its name from Ludwig Bemelmans, the artist who painted the whimsical Central Park mural that covers all four walls of the bar in 1947 in exchange for a year's hotel residency. The bar has barely changed since: the gold-leaf ceiling, the leather banquettes, the white-jacketed waiters, and the nightly live piano (jazz and standards, never amplified, always with an audience of conspicuously well-dressed Upper East Siders). The Carlyle does not make a particular virtue of its cocktail list — the drinks are excellent but conventional; the real experience is the room, the music, and the feeling of inhabiting a New York that feels impervious to time. Preferred partner perks available at The Carlyle.

King Cole Bar — The St. Regis New York

The King Cole Bar's claim to cocktail history is the Bloody Mary — or, more precisely, the Red Snapper, which the bar's first head bartender Fernand Petiot brought from Harry's Bar in Paris in 1934 and modified with Worcestershire sauce and horseradish into the version that became the modern Bloody Mary. The bar's backdrop is the Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole (painted 1906) that has presided over more New York power lunches and celebrations than any other painting in the city. The bar operates at the intersection of cocktail history and current relevance — the Bloody Mary is still on the menu, still made to Petiot's specification, and still one of the best in the city. Preferred partner perks available at The St. Regis New York.

The Peninsula Bar — The Peninsula New York

On the fifth floor of the Peninsula's Fifth Avenue tower — with the midtown Manhattan roofline visible through the full-height windows — the Pen-Top Bar at the Peninsula operates as New York's most elegant rooftop hotel bar experience during the warmer months. The interior bar, Clement, is one of the most technically accomplished hotel cocktail programs in the city year-round, with a menu that changes seasonally and a spirits selection that rivals the city's specialist cocktail bars. Preferred partner perks available at The Peninsula New York.

Asia: Ritual & Spectacle

Long Bar — Raffles Hotel Singapore

The Singapore Sling was invented at the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel in 1915, by bartender Ngiam Tong Boon. That single fact has made the Long Bar one of the most visited bars in the world — not because the Singapore Sling is the most technically impressive cocktail (it is not) but because the combination of that story, the colonial-era Raffles setting, and the particular ritual of drinking the original recipe in the room where it was created produces an experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else on earth. The Long Bar's ceiling fans, the bags of peanuts (whose shells are traditionally dropped on the floor), and the barmen who have been mixing Singapore Slings longer than most travelers have been alive make this the rare case of a tourist bar that fully deserves its reputation. Preferred partner perks available at Raffles Hotel Singapore.

Bamboo Bar — Mandarin Oriental Bangkok

On the banks of the Chao Phraya River — in a hotel that opened in 1876 as the Oriental Hotel and has hosted every significant writer, artist, and dignitary to pass through Southeast Asia since — the Bamboo Bar is one of the oldest and most atmospheric hotel bars in Asia. The nightly jazz programming, the river breezes through the open-sided room, and the particular quality of the light over the Chao Phraya at dusk produce a setting that the hotel's celebrated literary history (Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and Graham Greene all stayed here) makes impossible to sit in without a certain awareness of time and place. Preferred partner perks available at Mandarin Oriental Bangkok.

Felix Bar — The Peninsula Hong Kong

Philippe Starck designed the Felix restaurant and bar on the 28th floor of the Peninsula's tower for a specific purpose: to create a room where the view of Hong Kong harbour dominates everything, and where the design elements — the hand-beaten aluminium walls, the twin aluminum towers framing the window views — serve the spectacle of the city below rather than competing with it. The bar program is excellent and contemporary; the urinals in the men's room have an unobstructed harbour view through floor-to-ceiling glass, which has become one of the most discussed single features in the history of hotel design. The Felix experience is simultaneously spectacular and intimate in a way that no other bar at this altitude manages. Preferred partner perks available at The Peninsula Hong Kong.

Marrakech: The Churchill Bar

Churchill Bar — La Mamounia, Marrakech

Winston Churchill, who visited La Mamounia repeatedly and called it "the most beautiful place in the world," has a bar named after him in a hotel that has attracted the world's most celebrated guests since 1923. La Mamounia is the most famous hotel in Africa and arguably the most famous in the Arab world — its gardens, its Moorish architecture, and its particular combination of Moroccan craftsmanship and Western luxury have made it the standard against which all subsequent Moroccan luxury is measured. The Churchill Bar, with its dark paneling, its collection of Churchill memorabilia, and its cocktails served with the formality that La Mamounia's service culture demands, is the closest thing in Marrakech to a classic European hotel bar — and all the more extraordinary for existing in the middle of the Medina. Preferred partner perks available at La Mamounia.

What Makes a Hotel Bar Legendary

The bars in this guide share properties that are easier to observe in the finished article than to engineer in advance. The Connaught Bar's tableside martini service, Bar Hemingway's literary mythology, Bemelmans Bar's mural — none of these were designed to become the bar's defining characteristic. They accumulated over time, around a room that was built well enough to last and a hotel that cared enough to maintain it.

The common thread: every great hotel bar is inextricable from its hotel. Remove Bemelmans Bar from The Carlyle and it becomes a theme bar. Remove Bar Hemingway from the Ritz Paris and it becomes a literary-themed cocktail bar. Remove the Long Bar from Raffles and the Singapore Sling becomes just a cocktail. The bar and the hotel create each other's meaning — which is why the great hotel bars are not replicable, and why the hotels that house them deserve to be visited as much as the bars themselves.