The Best Hotel Bars in the World (Seven We've Actually Drunk In)
The Best Hotel Bars in the World (Seven We've Actually Drunk In)
The plan is never to drink in the hotel. You land, drop the bags, tell yourself you’ll find somewhere local — then you go down for one before dinner and the person behind the bar turns out to be better than anywhere you’d have walked to. That’s how most of the drinks on this list happened.
We’ve stayed in a lot of hotels, and the bar usually gets one paragraph in the review and then disappears. These seven earned more — some we went back to every night of the stay, and one of them we found by going through a secret door and up a flight of stairs.
One rule about how we picked: a view on its own doesn’t count. What got these seven on the list is a person, a bottle, a room or a habit — and each comes with a catch, which we’ve written in rather than left out.
The one we’d travel for: P41 at Hotel Arts, Barcelona
P41 sits a few floors below the rooms at Hotel Arts in Barcelona. The name is short for Parallel 41 — the line of latitude the city sits on — and the menu is built from other cities on that line, so the drinks arrive as boarding passes. Behind the bar is Diego Baud, who won the Essence Century Cocktail Competition in 2015.
Nearly every drink comes with a snack made to go with it, which almost nobody does. Ask whether Home Sweet Corn is still on: bourbon with brown butter, corn in liquid form, dehydrated corn on top, served beside popcorn and a cob of corn. Or My Heart Beets For You — Japanese gin, ginger, patchouli and beetroot juice with an oyster perched on top.
He also runs a masterclass called Liquid Journey, where he teaches you to rebuild his drinks at home. Ours used mushroom-infused tequila, corn salt, and coasters pressed from the leftover ginger out of his own syrup. At the end he asks your favourite season, how you take your coffee and your favourite spirit, then invents a drink from the answers.
Honest notes: Liquid Journey is a class you opt into, not something you wander into, and Hotel Arts is enormous — getting from the front door to our room took three separate lifts.
“I can’t think of another place where I can dine on a tasting menu by 2 Michelin Star Chef Paco Perez, and then head down to the bar to finish the night with a perfectly mixed Negroni by Diego Baud, all in front of the ocean.
The lobby bar we’d go back to every evening: the Four Seasons Milano
Aperitivo — the Italian habit of a drink and a plate of snacks before dinner — is one of our favourite Italian traditions, and something we do at home anyway. The lobby bar at the Four Seasons Milano — Il Foyer when we drank there, Stilla now — does it properly: take a table where the room can see you, or sit in the corner on a deep sofa and watch Milan come to life.
The cocktail programme was Luca Marcellin’s when we were there, and he was patient in a way I’d struggle to be. I asked him a hundred versions of “what is that?” and “why are you doing that?”, and he answered every one. Chris and I order the odd spirit and the unfamiliar bottle, so that mattered.
This is the drink before the night out, not the night out. And if you’d rather drink somewhere else entirely, ask the concierge — they gave us eleven recommendations over one stay, we went to ten of them, and every one was better than the last.
The one for a drink you think you don’t like: Scotch at The Balmoral
The Balmoral stands at number 1 Princes Street, one of Edinburgh’s grandest addresses, under a clock tower you can see from most of the city. The clock runs three minutes fast on purpose — a habit left over from its years as the station hotel, so guests wouldn’t miss their trains.
Its whisky bar is called Scotch, and it holds over 500 malts, blends and vintages from every corner of the country. I had been put off scotch for years; the bartenders here know the shelves well enough that they found me several I actually liked, and we spent far more of that stay in that room than we’d planned. There’s a guided whisky tasting too, if you’d rather be walked through it than pick blind.
Who it’s for: whisky drinkers, and the curious. If whisky isn’t your thing at all, the hotel’s other bar — the Balmoral Bar — does cocktails, beer, wine and bar snacks, so nobody in your group is stranded. Upstairs, J.K. Rowling wrote the final chapters of Harry Potter in room 552.
The rooftop with a door you have to find: The Speakeasy, Bangkok
Nearly every building in Bangkok has a rooftop something, and most of them are packed. Hotel Muse — Hotel Muse Bangkok Langsuan, Autograph Collection now — is unusually calm for the city, and its bar is at the top of it: lift to the top floor, through a secret passage, up one more flight of stairs, and you’re out.
It was quiet up there — no crowd to fight for the view, no overzealous backpackers in sight. We sat down for one and stood up two hours and several mojitos later. When we wrote up the city’s five best rooftops, this was one of our favourites; the mojitos are strong and the edamame on the side is the right order.
Two honest notes. Eat downstairs — you can order food up here, but Medici’s, the Italian restaurant in the same hotel, is worth saving your appetite for, and its Negronis were among the best we’ve had, Italy included. And most Bangkok bars enforce a dress code: long trousers for men even in 100-degree heat, no flip-flops, no beach clothes.
The one with the peacocks: Bob’s Bar, Capella Singapore
Capella is on Sentosa, a small island joined to Singapore by a bridge — or by cable car, if you want to make an entrance. There are wild peacocks on the property; a flock of them met us at the front of the hotel instead of a doorman.
They also know exactly when happy hour is. Having cocktails with peacocks was a first for us.
Take the birds away and it’s still the bar we’d have picked. Our bartender, Flora, knew our standing orders cold — Old Fashioneds and Sazeracs, two old classics, each with her own twist on it.
Who it’s for: people staying put. Sentosa is about twenty minutes from the city centre, and Capella is a retreat from the busy part of Singapore. If you want to walk to your bar, sleep in town instead.
“Like clockwork, wild peacocks would appear at happy hour around Bob’s Bar (knowing that this meant bar snacks in abundance) looking for some friends to share a meal with.
The bartender who made me my own drink: Hidden Bar, Abu Dhabi
The Rosewood is a 34-storey tower on Al Maryah Island, in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s new financial district. Its bar is called Hidden Bar, and the reason it’s here is a bartender called Mads.
He already knew what we drink — a Penicillin, a Vieux Carré — and his Mezcal Margarita is worth the taxi on its own. Then, when he found out I love mezcal, he went and infused a batch of it with pineapple so I’d have something nobody else was drinking. I might be slightly partial to Mads, but every bartender we met there knew how to make a proper drink.
The room is chic and laid back rather than formal, and the outdoor patio looks over one of the best of Abu Dhabi’s several skylines — and you don’t have to be a guest. The catch is getting there: Al Maryah Island is still largely a building site and it’s too hot to walk most of the year, so plan on a cab.
The beach bar: Monarch Bay Beach Club, Dana Point
This one is a table on the sand rather than a drinks list. The Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach sits back from the water on a hillside in Dana Point, California, and its beach club is at the bottom — you get there on a little tram that takes seven minutes and leaves every fifteen. Umbrellas, chairs and towels are set out before you arrive.
We’d left our two boys with their grandparents in San Diego and driven up the coast for our first night without kids in a very long time. We had margaritas and tacos — the tacos are enormous — and maybe a shot or two. We were right on the beach, so we wrapped up in the blankets under the heat lamps to stay warm, and lost track of the time.
Two things to know. The beach club is for resort guests and you’re relying on that tram, so it isn’t a bar you drop into off the street. And at Club 19 by the golf course, go carefully on the Negroni — the pours are huge. Our bartender packed mine to go so I could finish it in the room.
Two more we’d send you to
Drunkards Alley in Tokyo is the opposite of everything else here — no hotel, no view, no menu. It’s a dark, dank, borderline creepy alley in Shibuya, steps from the neon of Shibuya Crossing, and the only thing down it is bars. Very small bars, four to six stools apiece, full at five people. The drinks aren’t cheap and you’ll walk straight past it a few times before you spot it.
And in Kuala Lumpur, the MO Bar at the Mandarin Oriental is the dependable one: big windows onto the gardens of City Center Park, a small outdoor area, and a Thai-jito that took us straight back to our time in Thailand. Their advice is the right advice — tell the bartender your spirit of choice and let them work.
The thing to take from all of this: the best bar in a hotel is almost never the highest one in the building. It’s the one where somebody behind the counter remembers what you ordered last night.
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