Editorial
Bars featured in films carry a different kind of weight. The real ones — the actual locations where cameras rolled and scenes were shot — attract a particular kind of visitor who wants to sit in the booth where a scene happened, order the drink a character ordered, and understand why that room worked on screen. These are the bars worth the pilgrimage.
New York has provided more memorable bar settings for film than any other city. The light in the rooms, the density of the streets outside, and the way these bars were used in scripts have made them permanent fixtures of American cinema.
European bars have shaped cinema as much as cinema has shaped European bars. Rick's Café in Casablanca was fictional but Harry's Bar in Venice was not, and the distinction matters when you are planning where to actually drink.
Los Angeles has its own bars that made it to the screen and back again — places where film crews drank, where deals were made, and where the line between what was happening on set and what was happening off it grew particularly thin.
The bars featured in films that are worth visiting are the ones where the room itself is the reason — not the film that referenced it. McSorley's in New York, Harry's New York Bar in Paris, and Musso and Frank in Hollywood are all excellent bars that happen to have appeared on screen. The film connection is a bonus, not the point.
We recommend Chumley's in the West Village for those who want the full literary speakeasy experience and Vesuvio in San Francisco for those drawn to the Beat Generation geography. Both rooms deliver something the screen cannot capture.
If you want to take the cinema-bar relationship further, our guide to the best bars themed around movies covers the other direction — bars that have built entire concepts around a single film's aesthetic world, rather than bars that films happened to find.
James has spent years tracking the intersection of bar culture and American storytelling — from the speakeasies that became shorthand for Prohibition to the Hollywood bars where scripts were written on cocktail napkins.