Editorial
The most interesting bar cities right now are not the ones at the top of the global rankings — those lists document the present. The most interesting bar cities on the rise are the ones where the infrastructure is being built, the prices have not yet adjusted to reflect the quality, and the bartenders have the energy of people who are doing something for the first time rather than protecting a reputation. We track six of them below.
Athens has rebuilt its bar scene from the wreckage of the austerity years, and the result is one of Europe's most energetic cocktail cities. The bars that emerged from that period are characterised by a scarcity mentality that translated into creativity — bartenders who could not afford premium imported spirits built programmes around Greek ouzo, mastiha, and tsipouro, and discovered those spirits were more interesting than the imports they replaced.
Medellín's transformation over the past two decades is well-documented, but its bar scene has not yet received equivalent international attention. The cocktail programmes in El Poblado and Laureles are building on Colombian rum, aguardiente, and tropical fruit in ways that feel original, and the prices are absurd in the best sense — a serious cocktail costs what a mediocre one costs in London. Mexico City belongs in the same conversation: the Roma Norte scene is producing bars that rank among the best in the Americas, and our Best Bars in Mexico City guide maps the essential 14. For detailed bar reviews, our pages on Licorería Limantour and Hanky Panky cover the bars that put CDMX on the world map, while the Mexico City bar guide covers all 84 across nine neighbourhoods.
Nairobi's bar scene is the story of East Africa's expanding middle class meeting international hospitality investment, and the results are more sophisticated than most visiting drinkers expect. The city's cocktail bars draw on Kenyan gin, local botanicals, and African fruit profiles in ways that have no parallel anywhere else, and the informal bar culture — the nyama choma spots and the open-air neighbourhood bars — provides context that most cocktail-focused visitors miss.
Tel Aviv's bar scene operates without the constraints of most international cocktail cultures — no licensing restrictions that require closing at midnight, a culinary culture that treats bold flavours as a baseline rather than a point of difference, and a local spirit category (arak) that provides a distinctive backbone for cocktails that are genuinely unlike anything available elsewhere. The city is permanently on the rise in the sense that it never stops building.
The bar cities on the rise share a common characteristic: they are building bar cultures around what they have rather than importing what they think they should have. Athens uses mastiha and tsipouro. Medellín uses aguardiente and tropical fruit. Nairobi uses Kenyan gin and East African botanicals. The result in each case is a cocktail identity that cannot be replicated anywhere else, which is the only sustainable competitive advantage a bar city can have.
Go now. Browse our full city directory for all 72 cities we cover, and check the most underrated bar cities for the cities that are already there but the world has not yet noticed. For a ranked look at which cities our editors are most excited about heading into the second half of 2025, see our annual most exciting bar cities 2025 feature — which overlaps with this list in several places but adds new entrants that have emerged since this article was published.
Marcus covers Latin America, the Pacific, and emerging bar cities globally. He has a particular interest in bar scenes built around local spirit traditions rather than imported cocktail culture, and has spent several seasons tracking Medellín, Athens, and Nairobi as they built their scenes from the ground up.