Editorial
The bar guide to Miami requires a specific disclaimer: the Miami that most visitors experience, the South Beach corridor from Ocean Drive to Collins Avenue, is not the Miami that residents drink in. It is an outdoor entertainment complex that happens to serve alcohol, and the bars in it are priced and programmed accordingly. This guide covers that strip where the bars are genuinely worth it, and then spends the rest of its time in the Miami that matters: Wynwood, Brickell, Little Havana, and Design District.
Miami drinks late, even by American standards. The bars that are worth visiting on a Friday night do not reach their correct operating temperature until after midnight. Plan accordingly, sleep in on Saturday, and understand that Miami operates on a timezone that is technically Eastern but culturally closer to Havana.
South Beach is not the disaster it was in the 1990s when every bar charged $18 for a well drink and the clientele was sorted by velvet rope. There are 6 to 8 bars in the South Beach area that are genuinely worth your time. The trick is knowing which ones, arriving at the right hour, and not confusing the good ones with the thousands of average options surrounding them.
The bar scene that Miami residents actually use is concentrated in Wynwood for the creative and arts crowd, Brickell for the financial district after-work scene, and a scattering of neighbourhood bars in Little Haiti, Little Havana, and the Upper East Side that have not yet been discovered by the people who write about bars. All three zones are worth your time for different reasons.
Miami has the best rooftop bar scene in the continental United States. The combination of year-round warm weather, a skyline that was purpose-built for the late 20th century, and hotel budgets that have consistently prioritised the rooftop experience has produced a collection of elevated drinking spaces that no other American city can match.
Miami is a better bar city than its reputation suggests, largely because the reputation is based on the 1% of the city that faces the ocean on South Beach. The Miami that actually drinks well operates in the neighbourhoods, on the rooftops of Brickell, in the back gardens of Edgewater, and in Little Havana on a Friday night when the music starts. This guide gives you 7 entry points to that Miami.
The Miami cocktail bars guide covers 25 more in detail. For the after-work drinking culture specifically, the Miami after-work bars guide focuses on the Brickell and Downtown bars that the financial district uses from 5pm onward. The complete Miami bar guide covers all 8 categories across every neighbourhood.
Marcus covers the US West Coast and South Florida bar scenes, with a particular focus on the intersection of Latin American drinking culture and American craft cocktails. He has been writing about Miami's bar scene since 2012 and keeps a permanent bar tab at Lagniappe.