Editorial
The best bars for solo travel are not the ones with the most Instagram followers. They are the ones with a counter seat facing the action, a bartender who can read the room, and enough ambient noise that you do not feel like everyone is watching you eat a burger alone. We have been drinking solo across four continents for the better part of a decade, and these are the bars that made us glad we went in.
New York is one of the world's great solo drinking cities. The counter culture here is real — bartenders are paid to talk, the neighbourhoods are walkable, and no one looks twice at a single person occupying a bar stool for two hours. These are the ones we keep going back to. For a full city-specific breakdown — bar by bar, neighbourhood by neighbourhood — our solo bar hopping guide to New York covers 10 bars with detailed notes on when to arrive and what to order.
European cities have a different relationship with solo bar culture — more café-adjacent, more accepting of the person who nurses a single drink for ninety minutes while reading a book. London and Amsterdam are particularly good for this, and these bars understand it. If you are choosing which city to visit as a solo drinker, read our dedicated guide on the safest cities for solo bar hopping, which covers transport, safety, and solo bar culture across 8 cities.
Berlin has no closing time, which means the solo traveller who arrives at a bar at 11pm is not early — they are on time. Barcelona's bar culture rewards the person who turns up alone at 7pm for a vermouth and a piece of cheese. Both cities take solo drinking seriously, which is why they appear on almost every edition of our best bars for solo travel list.
The best bars for solo travel share a few consistent qualities: a counter or bar seat facing the action, staff who initiate conversation without being overbearing, and a room where a single person does not feel like a gap in the seating plan. If the bar has a no-reservations policy, even better — it signals a place that is comfortable with the unpredictable. For solo travellers on the move, we also recommend our guide to bars worth visiting when in transit — the specific city bars worth leaving the terminal for during a layover, mapped by airport with transit times.
Our strongest advice: avoid anywhere that requires a booking for one. Go early in the evening before the group bookings take over. Sit at the bar rather than a table. And tell the bartender where you are from — it is the most reliable conversation starter in any city on earth. For the research phase before any solo trip, our guide on how to find a great bar in an unfamiliar city and our companion piece on finding the best bars abroad give you the full pre-trip framework.
James has been drinking his way across cities since 2010. He has sat at bars alone in forty-three countries and has strong opinions about which ones make solo drinkers feel welcome.