Museo Chicote, by the people who drank here
Museo Chicote opened on Gran Vía 12 in 1931 as the personal project of Perico Chicote, a bartender who had spent the 1920s working at the Ritz and the Palace and had decided he wanted his own room. The bar became, almost immediately, the centre of the city's foreign-correspondent and film-star drinking circuit, and stayed there for forty years. The interior - mahogany, brass, the Art Deco fittings of 1931 - has been kept largely intact. The bar's identity is in the people who used it. Six matter most.
Ernest Hemingway
1937–1959
Drank here during the Spanish Civil War while covering the conflict for the North American Newspaper Alliance, then returned regularly through the 1940s and 1950s. Famously had his own table near the back and ordered Bloody Marys before that drink had a wide international audience. Wrote part of For Whom the Bell Tolls in the booth opposite the bar.
Ava Gardner
1955–1968
Lived in Madrid throughout the 1950s and 60s and treated Chicote as her local. Allegedly threw a glass at a photographer who tried to take her picture; the bar threw the photographer out and kept the actress. Her preferred drink was a Tom Collins; the bar still makes it the way she ordered it.
Frank Sinatra
1956 (one visit)
Came once, in 1956, while filming The Pride and the Passion outside Madrid. Tipped the bartender a hundred-dollar bill, then complained that the bar's Old Fashioned was made with rye instead of bourbon. The bartender on duty disagreed but made him the bourbon version anyway. The story is repeated, slightly differently, by every senior bartender at Chicote.
Salvador Dalí
1940s–1970s
Treated the bar as a workspace. Designed the cover of one of the bar's early cocktail menus in exchange for a year of free drinks - the original menu is framed near the back wall. Ordered absinthe almost exclusively, despite the bar's preference for him to drink something easier to make.
Orson Welles
1960s–1985
Filmed parts of Chimes at Midnight in Madrid in the mid-60s and returned regularly throughout the rest of his life. Sat at the bar, never at a table. Ordered whisky highballs almost exclusively. Was once the subject of a photograph taken from across Gran Vía that ran in Life magazine in 1966.
The Saturday-night regulars now
2026–
The bar is busy with a contemporary crowd - young Madrileños on dates, theatre-goers from the Gran Vía musicals, business travellers staying at the nearby hotels. The cocktail programme has been quietly modernised since 2018 but the room itself looks like the room Hemingway photographed. Order a Bloody Mary, sit in the booth opposite the bar, and the visit makes a particular kind of sense.
Address
Gran Vía 12, Centro
Hours
12pm-2am, daily
Best to order
Bloody Mary, Tom Collins, Old Fashioned
Best seat
Booth opposite the bar