BY MARIA YAGODA
Image Courtesy of The Ritz Paris
While it’s now hard to imagine any city around the world, big or small, without a scene of cocktail bars mixing inventive and often excellent drinks, that wasn’t always the case. Cocktail culture as we know it today blossomed thanks to a small number of boundary-pushing bars and the bartenders nurtured inside of them, setting trends that rippled for years to come.
The following ten cocktail bars around the world, most of them still open, have had an outsize influence on how we drink today. Some of these establishments made the list because their bartenders invented cocktails we now find everywhere (think: the Oaxaca Old Fashioned, frozen daiquiris and Negroni Sbagliato); others because they housed talent that would go on to open award-winning projects around the world. A few spots may not have always been on the cutting edge of drink invention, but played integral roles in establishing their cities’ cocktail scenes (in mixology capitals like Milan, New Orleans and Paris), in turn influencing the entire industry.
Check out these ten influential cocktail bars around the world that impacted drinks history forever.
Death and Co
New York, USA
It’s impossible to talk about the craft cocktail revival without a nod towards Death & Co, the dimly lit East Village bar that opened on New Year’s Eve 2006 and changed the drinks world forever. Thanks to a rotating door of visionary mixologists, who were given the creative freedom to invent cocktails that you now find on menus the world over (like the Oaxaca Old Fashioned and Naked and Famous), Death and Co helped shape modern craft cocktail culture.
The speakeasy-style bar now has three other locations—in Denver, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—and continues to set trends, one of which is the ubiquity of agave-based spirits in cocktails. Cocktail writer Robert Simonson declared that bartender Phil Ward’s Oaxaca Old Fashioned, which did away with the whiskey, “opened the American mixology world’s eyes to the potential of using tequila and mezcal in cocktails.”
American Bar at the Savoy
London, England
Located inside one of the world’s glitziest hotels, the 131-year-old American Bar at the Savoy is the oldest surviving cocktail bar in London. It’s the most influential one, too, in part because former owner Harry Craddock penned what may be the most significant tome in mixology, The Savoy Cocktail Book. Originally published in 1930, it contains a whopping 750 cocktail recipes.
In addition to inventing classics like the Corpse Reviver No. 2, and possibly the dry martini, Craddock lives on in his ever-relevant reference book, which is still considered a must-read for bartenders. But the bar is far from a rusty antique. Unlike most other historic watering holes, it continues to land on world’s best bars lists and its menu refreshes regularly.
Long Bar
Singapore
The Raffles Hotel opened in colonial Singapore in the late 19th century, and the Long Bar followed soon after, becoming a popular gathering spot among plantation owners. Bartender Ngiam Tong Boon is said to have invented the Singapore Slingthere in 1915, a pink gin-based drink made with cherry brandy and Bénédictine that became the national drink and an important piece of cocktail history.
While Long Bar has become more museum-like than cutting edge, it helped develop Singapore into the great cocktail capital of the world that it is today, with boundary-pushing bars like Jigger and Pony, Stay Gold Flamingo and MO Bar nurturing the next generation of talent.
El Floridita
Havana, Cuba
Opened over 200 years ago in the heart of Havana, and frequented by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Katharine Hepburn, this legendary bar is considered the godfather of the frozen daiquiri, having pioneered many of the rum-based, fruit-forward cocktails that are ubiquitous today.
Students of the frozen daiquiri’s inventor, bartender Costantino Ribalaigua Vert, became known as “cantineros,” and generated a whole style of bartending that originated in El Floridita. The bar, which is referred to as « la cuna del daiquiri » (the cradle of the daiquiri), remains one of the most famous in the world.
Milk and Honey
New York, USA
When Milk and Honey opened its doors in the Lower East Side in 1999, it changed the bar industry forever, launching the careers of so many of the world’s best bartenders. While the cocktail bar closed in 2020, countless talents, like Attaboy’s Sam Ross and Michael McIlroy, cut their teeth inside its doors, dreaming up cocktails that would become inescapable modern classics, including the Penicillin, the Gold Rush and the Paper Plane.
Milk and Honey is largely to thank for the global proliferation of speakeasy-style bars—outside of actual Prohibition, of course.
Bar Hemingway
Paris, France
It doesn’t get more legendary than the elegant 25-seat bar inside of the Ritz Paris, a place where Ernest Hemingway, JD Salinger, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter and the Fitzgeralds lingered over dry martinis. The storied hideaway is part of the reason why the cocktail became so timeless and chic.
After 29 years under the helm of Colin Field, consistently recognized as one of the best bartenders in the world and inventor of beloved drinks, like the Serendipity and the “Clean Dirty” Martini, Bar Hemingway saw young talent Anne-Sophie Prestail, Field’s former assistant, take the reins in 2023.
Don the Beachcomber
Los Angeles, CA
Considered the “Godfather of Tiki,” Donn Beach opened America’s first tiki bar in 1937, slinging tropical-themed rum drinks in a space adorned with nautical decor and kitschy escapist vibes. Other Don the Beachcomber locations opened around America, and the sweet tiki-style cocktails developed inside its doors— including the Mai Tai, the Navy Grog and the Zombie— cemented the bar’s legacy and spawned generations of imitators. While the original location is long closed, “tiki-style” cocktails and iconography have endured, even as the genre has rightly come under fire for appropriating Polynesian culture and promoting a colonial nostalgia that many Pacific Islanders find harmful.
Bar Basso
Milan, Italy
The Negroni may have been invented in the Florence bar Caffè Casoni in 1919, but Milan is the cocktail’s spiritual home. And Bar Basso is a great place to drink one. The bar opened in the 1950s and introduced aperitivo culture, characterized by its bitter lower-ABV drinks featuring liqueurs like Milan-based Campari and those irresistible little bowls of salty snacks to go with them.
Then in 1967, when founder Mirko Stocchetto accidentally created the Negroni Sbagliato (“mistaken Negroni,” which includes Proseccoinstead of gin), he solidified this iconic Milan bar’s place in cocktail history. Beyond this individual drink—which has experienced a resurgence in part thanks to a viral TikTok moment with House of Dragons star Emma D’Arcy—Bar Basso has been a vital fixture in the city for decades. In the 1970s it was a beacon for the art and fashion scene and in the 1980s it became the place for furniture designers to gossip. It’s still regarded as one of the coolest bars in Milan today for those in the know.
Sazerac Bar
New Orleans, USA
In a city with so many historic bars, many of which have contributed cocktails to the canon, the historic Sazerac Bar inside the Roosevelt Hotel is a true New Orleans institution. Formerly a speakeasy, the glam Art Deco bar helped foster the city’s pioneering cocktail culture that exploded in the 20th century.
Globally, Sazerac Bar has set the standard for hotel bars, which are now better than they’ve ever been. While its namesake cocktail wasn’t invented at the bar—it dates back to the 19th century and some credit a bartender named Sewell T. Taylor while others say it’s Antoine Peychaud, of the bitters fame—it was a favorite haunt for the city’s power brokers.
Harry’s New York Bar
Paris, France
Not many bars founded in 1911 can claim they consistently innovate, but then again, not many bars are Harry’s New York Bar, a Paris landmark that’s responsible for the Bloody Mary, Sidecar, French 75and Blue Lagoon, among other classics.
Like many historic Paris bars, Harry’s was frequented by noteworthy Americans in Paris like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and George Gerwshwin. Not to be confused with Harry Craddock, the virtuoso behind the American Bar at the Savoy, bartender Harry MacElhone took over in 1923 and still looms large at the place, which is still run by the MacElhone family.