Fredrik Filipsson, Co-founder & Editor in Chief
By a named editor
Fredrik Filipsson — Co-founder & Editor in Chief · LinkedIn ↗
Last reviewed 2026-04-17 · How we pick bars

Cape Town operates with a particular cocktail logic: everything is made from scratch, everything references the landscape, and the best bartenders approach their craft with the same uncompromising attention that the city's winemakers bring to the Constantia valley slopes two kilometres away. The result is a cocktail scene that has been quietly excellent for a decade and is now starting to receive the international attention it deserves — not as an emerging market with interesting potential but as a world-class destination with distinctive bars you cannot experience anywhere else.

Context matters: Cape Town's cocktail scene is concentrated in three areas — De Waterkant (the most established, slightly more upscale), Long Street (historic bar strip, more accessible, louder), and the V&A Waterfront (tourist-friendly, quality ranges significantly). The city's extraordinary fynbos ecosystem — 9,600 plant species unique to the Western Cape — has become a defining ingredient of the local cocktail identity, with bartenders using rooibos, buchu, and indigenous citrus in ways that are genuinely novel.

Orphanage cocktail lounge Cape Town
01 / 09

Orphanage Cocktail Emporium

Editor's Pick De Waterkant Victorian Decor R$$

The Orphanage opened in 2012 with a brief that seems, in retrospect, ahead of its time: a cocktail bar in De Waterkant that took craft seriously before "craft" was a category that Cape Town bars were competing in. More than a decade later, it remains one of the finest bars in the city — not because it has stayed the same, but because it has continued to evolve without losing the identity that made it matter in the first place. The Victorian-influenced decor (high ceilings, dark wood, glass cases containing antique curiosities) could read as costuming; instead it feels like a genuine aesthetic position, consistently inhabited.

The cocktail list is lengthy and organised thematically. The Cape Botanicals section deploys fynbos, rooibos, and indigenous herbs with the confidence of bartenders who have been working with these ingredients for years and understand their limits as well as their potential. The Cape Sour — a house signature made with local brandy, buchu tincture, lemon, egg white, and a few drops of aromatic bitters — has been on the menu in some form since year one and represents the Orphanage's central thesis: South African ingredients, classical technique, genuine quality.

Cause Effect cocktail kitchen Cape Town
02 / 09

Cause + Effect Cocktail Kitchen

Most Creative Cape Town CBD Award-Winning R$$

Cause + Effect took the notion of the cocktail kitchen seriously and built a bar around it: a working prep kitchen visible from the bar counter, where citrus is juiced, shrubs are made, infusions are set up and tasted, and where the cocktail programme is treated as food production rather than beverage service. The result is a menu of drinks with a depth of flavour and a consistency of freshness that counters the assumption that cocktail bars anywhere in Africa are necessarily behind their London or New York counterparts.

The cocktails here are genuinely difficult to categorise. A recent menu included a tea-smoked gin cocktail with a rooibos reduction and fermented gooseberry shrub that tasted nothing like any of those words suggested; a mezcal cocktail built around wild honey and kapokbos (a fynbos plant used traditionally as a headache remedy) that achieved the rare distinction of being simultaneously medicinal and delicious; and a non-alcoholic menu that takes the kitchen concept seriously and produces mocktails of comparable sophistication to the full list. Cause + Effect won Africa's Best Cocktail Bar in 2023. It felt like formal recognition of something the city already knew.

The Gin Bar Cape Town botanical
03 / 09

The Gin Bar

De Waterkant 150+ Gins Botanical Cocktails R$$

Cape Town has a particular relationship with gin that is both a product of its botanical landscape and its wine-country adjacent culture: the city consumes more gin per capita than almost any other city in Africa, and it produces several of the most interesting botanical gins in the Southern Hemisphere. The Gin Bar in De Waterkant has over 150 gins on its menu, with a dedicated section of Cape-distilled expressions that reads like a taxonomy of the Western Cape's plant life: buchu gin from the Cederberg, pelargonium gin from Constantia, rooibos gin from the Cederberg mountains.

The G&T menu is the bar's primary offering: fifteen house combinations, each matching a specific gin with a specific tonic and a specific garnish selected to draw out particular botanical elements. The Cederberg Buchu G&T — buchu gin, Mediterranean tonic, fresh rosemary, and a sliver of lemon — is the canonical Cape Town gin drink, and the Bar does it impeccably. The cocktail list beyond gin is shorter but equally competent. Weekend afternoons here, in the sunlit front room with the De Waterkant cobblestones visible through the windows, are one of Cape Town's better pleasures.

Best Classic Cocktails
Orphanage, De Waterkant
Most Creative
Cause + Effect, CBD
Best Gin Selection
The Gin Bar, De Waterkant
Best Atmosphere
Twankey Bar, Belmond
Truth coffee cocktail lounge Cape Town
04 / 09

Truth Coffee Roasting — Cocktail Hours

Cape Town CBD Steampunk Interior Coffee Cocktails R$

Truth is known primarily as a coffee roastery — it has been called one of the best coffee shops in the world on several occasions, and the steampunk-industrial interior (exposed brickwork, copper pipes, Victorian machinery displayed as sculpture) is among the most photographed café interiors on the continent. Less known is the evening cocktail programme that Truth runs from 5pm, which applies the same obsessive sourcing philosophy to spirits that the daytime kitchen applies to single-origin coffee.

The coffee cocktail menu is the obvious reason to visit in the evening: an Espresso Martini made with the roastery's own cold brew and a small-batch South African vodka; a coffee Old Fashioned built on a Bain's Cape Mountain Whisky base with Truth's own cold brew reduction; and a rotating seasonal coffee cocktail that changes with the featured origin each month. The non-coffee cocktails are carefully made but secondary — come here for the intersection of the two obsessions. The space at 5pm, with the espresso machines still running and the cocktail service beginning, is one of Cape Town's most specific and enjoyable moments.

Twankey Bar Belmond Cape Town hotel
05 / 09

Twankey Bar

Hotel Bar Excellence V&A Waterfront Belmond Hotel R$$$

The Twankey Bar inside the Belmond Mount Nelson Hotel takes its name from a character in a Victorian pantomime and its aesthetic from the British colonial period in Cape Town — all pink walls, ceiling fans, and rattan furniture, executed with the kind of self-awareness that transforms what could be nostalgia into something more playful and considered. The bar has been operating in some form since the hotel opened in 1899, which makes it one of the oldest hospitality institutions in South Africa and gives it a particular authority among the city's bartenders.

The cocktail list is divided between South African classics (Amarula cream cocktails, Cape brandy sours, wine-based long drinks) and an international programme that is as well-executed as any comparable hotel bar in London or Singapore. The service here is exceptional — the bartenders have a level of table awareness and conversational intelligence that is rare at this price point. Come for afternoon cocktails and stay for the garden-facing terrace, which catches the late Cape Town sun and is among the most civilised outdoor drinking spots in the Southern Hemisphere.

Long Street cocktail bar Cape Town
06 / 09

Beerhouse on Long

Long Street 99 Beers + Cocktails R$ Noon–2am

Beerhouse is primarily, as its name declares, about beer — it maintains the largest craft beer selection in the city at any given time. But the cocktail programme deserves mention because it deploys South African craft spirits with a particular flair for the accessible: the beer-cocktail hybrids (beer Sangrias, beer Margaritas using local craft lagers) are genuinely interesting rather than gimmicky, and the conventional cocktail list is priced for Long Street's democratic approach to an evening out. The space across three floors of a converted Victorian building on Long Street holds a particular energy that the upscale De Waterkant bars cannot replicate: everyone is here, all at once, all having a good time.

The Long Street experience is a Cape Town essential that operates separately from the craft cocktail scene — it is louder, cheaper, more raucous, and more representative of the city's actual drinking culture than the Orphanage or Cause + Effect. Beerhouse does it at the highest level. The rooftop terrace on warm evenings, with Table Mountain visible to the south and Long Street's density of activity audible below, is the best free show in the city.

Botanical cocktail bar Cape Town
07 / 09

Kloof Street House

Gardens Victorian Villa $$ From 5pm

Kloof Street House occupies a restored Victorian villa in the Gardens neighbourhood — the residential area that climbs toward Table Mountain above the CBD — and its bar-restaurant has the quality of somewhere that has understood its setting and leaned entirely into it: candlelit rooms, fireplaces in winter, a garden terrace in summer, and a cocktail list that references the mountain landscape visible from the upper terrace. The buchu and rooibos cocktails here are among the city's most thoughtfully constructed, using ingredients foraged or sourced from small Western Cape producers with genuine supply chain relationships rather than the decorative farm-to-glass marketing found at lesser establishments.

The atmosphere at Kloof Street House rewards unhurried evenings. This is not a bar for a quick drink before dinner; it is a bar for settling in, ordering a second round, and allowing the particular Cape Town rhythm — slower and warmer than most of the world's major cities — to set the pace. The cocktail list changes quarterly; the current spring menu includes a Chenin Blanc Spritz that uses the Cape's under-appreciated white wine variety as a cocktail base in a way that makes perfect sense once you taste it.

Brandy cocktail bar South Africa Cape Town
08 / 09

The Brandy Bar at Rust en Vrede

Stellenbosch / Day Trip Cape Brandy Specialist $$$ By Appointment

Technically a day trip (45 minutes from Cape Town by car), but the Brandy Bar at Rust en Vrede in Stellenbosch belongs on this list because it does something no in-city bar can: it demonstrates the full range of Cape brandy in an environment that was built for it, surrounded by the vines that produce the wine that becomes the spirit. South African brandy is, by regulation, required to be made from wine grapes and aged in small oak barrels — a production standard that exceeds most international requirements and results in spirits of genuine quality that remain systematically under-appreciated outside South Africa.

The brandy flight here — five expressions across a range of ages and styles, accompanied by notes written by the estate's distiller — is one of the most illuminating tasting experiences available within three hours of Cape Town. The cocktail programme uses the estate's brandy as primary spirit in a small selection of original serves that function as arguments for the category rather than merely demonstrations of it. If Cape Town's cocktail scene has a secret — the one thing you cannot experience by staying in the city centre — this is it.

Natural wine cocktail bar Cape Town
09 / 09

Fermentation Lab

Woodstock Natural / Fermented R$$ From 4pm

Woodstock has been Cape Town's creative neighbourhood for long enough that it is now, depending on your perspective, either authentically gritty or expensively curated — probably both simultaneously. Fermentation Lab occupies a converted warehouse on the Woodstock strip and operates at the intersection of two trends that are not usually combined: natural wine and fermented cocktail ingredients. The bar produces its own kombucha, tepache, shrubs, and fermented fruit waters, which are used as cocktail modifiers alongside a selection of natural and low-intervention wines from Cape winemakers who share the ethos.

The result is a drinks list that is genuinely distinct from anything available in the city's more conventional bars: a cocktail menu where the most interesting elements are often the non-spirit ingredients — a fermented gooseberry kombucha that gives a Negroni a sour-tannic complexity that regular bitters cannot achieve; a tepache base for a rum sour that adds a pineapple-spice depth without sweetness. The bar operates with a low-waste philosophy that includes serving cocktails in reusable vessels and offering a carry-home option for house ferments. It is the Cape Town cocktail bar that most completely reflects where the global conversation is going.

Cape Town Cocktail Culture: What to Know

Cape Town's cocktail scene operates within a broader hospitality culture shaped by the city's unique geography, seasonal rhythms, and the ongoing evolution of South African craft spirits. A few things are worth understanding before your first evening out.

Local spirits to know: Bain's Cape Mountain Whisky (triple-aged grain whisky, exceptional quality-to-price ratio), Inverroche Gin (fynbos botanicals, three expressions), Van Ryn's Cape Brandy (the benchmark for the category), and Leonista Blanco (agave spirit grown in the Cape, technically agave brandy, genuinely interesting). Any Cape Town cocktail bar worth visiting will feature at least one of these, and several will have all four.

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