Editorial
The best cave bars worldwide are the only category of bar where the venue itself is genuinely irreplaceable. You can move a cocktail programme. You can rebuild a speakeasy. You cannot move a cave. The 10 bars on this list occupy geological formations that took between 10,000 and 300 million years to form, and every one of them has found a way to make a great drink inside a space that no interior designer could recreate even with unlimited budget and a very good imagination.
The constant temperature. The acoustics. The weight of the rock above your head creating a particular quality of quiet that is different from any indoor space designed for quietness. Cave bars also work because they impose a kind of honesty on the bar programme: in a room this atmospheric, a mediocre cocktail is a missed opportunity that the space does not forgive. The bars on this list understand that the cave sets a standard that the drinks must meet.
The Mediterranean basin has more caves per square kilometre of coastline than almost any other region on earth, and the bar industry has been making use of this geography for decades. The following three bars represent very different approaches to operating in a karst landscape.
Outside Europe and the Mediterranean, cave bars are rarer but often more striking because the geological context is so different. These four represent the best of what the Americas, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific have to offer in the way of drinking inside a rock formation.
Cave bars worldwide are the most extreme version of a simple principle: the right room changes how you drink. The bars on this list range from a 2,000-year-old volcanic tuff chamber in Turkey to a limestone sinkhole in Mexico, and all 10 demonstrate that geological atmosphere is the one quality that no amount of interior design budget can buy.
We recommend visiting cave bars in the early evening when possible. The temperature differential from outside to inside is at its most noticeable at this hour, the lighting tends to be at its best, and the caves that face outward — Buza, Manos, Grotta Palazzese — have the best timing for the last light of the day. Book ahead for the European and Turkish options in summer. Show up early for the others.
Tom covers craft spirits, whisky, and unusual drinking environments for several publications. He has a particular interest in the relationship between geology and fermentation, and has now visited 14 cave bars across 11 countries.