Editorial
The best bars in Soho London are genuinely some of the finest in the country — and the neighbourhood has been earning that reputation for the better part of a century. Soho has always attracted the kind of people who know how to drink well, and the bars that have survived the recent years of rising rents and tourism saturation have done so by being exceptionally good at what they do. These are our picks: honest, specific, and based on actual visits. Soho connects naturally to the bars of Covent Garden to the east and Mayfair to the west — both worth including on a longer evening.
Soho runs from Oxford Street south to Leicester Square and from Charing Cross Road west to Regent Street. It sounds small on a map and is enormous in practice — there are more bars per square kilometre here than anywhere else in London. Most of them are mediocre. These are the ones that aren't.
Soho is one of the best date-night neighbourhoods in London — dense enough to walk between options, good enough that the quality is rarely disappointing. These bars have the right combination of atmosphere, drink quality, and noise level for an evening that requires actual conversation.
Not everything worth drinking in Soho is a cocktail bar. The neighbourhood has some of the best-preserved old pubs in central London, and a handful of wine bars that have been quietly excellent for years. These four are our picks.
Soho remains one of the best drinking neighbourhoods in Europe — high density, high quality, and genuinely varied across price points and styles. The cocktail bars in the W1 postcode are particularly strong right now, with a generation of bartenders who trained at the best places in the city now running their own rooms. The old pubs remain irreplaceable for a different reason: they still feel like Soho.
Our advice: start at Bar Termini for a Negroni, walk to Swift for a whisky, finish the evening at Milk and Honey if you can get a booking. That's a Soho night done properly.
Sofia has covered London's bar scene for a decade with a particular focus on Central London. She has a weakness for natural wine and Soho pubs that haven't changed since 1985.