The History of Speakeasy Bars and Why They Are Coming Back
JH
James Harlow
7 min read
The history of speakeasy bars is inseparable from the history of American ambivalence about alcohol — and about rules. Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, and during those thirteen years, an estimated 30,000 illegal bars operated in New York City alone. The speakeasy was not a niche phenomenon. It was an entire parallel economy. What is interesting is what happened after repeal: the format did not disappear. It adapted, went dormant, and then, starting in the early 2000s, came back — and it has not stopped growing since.
Prohibition and the Original Speakeasies
The Volstead Act, which implemented the 18th Amendment in 1920, made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors illegal in the United States. Within a year, more than a thousand speakeasies were operating in Manhattan. By the late 1920s, the number had grown tenfold. The word itself came from advice given to patrons: speak easy, speak quietly, don't draw attention to where you're going or what you're doing there.
The original speakeasies ranged from grimy basement rooms serving bathtub gin to remarkably sophisticated cocktail bars staffed by professional bartenders who had moved underground rather than leave the trade. The 21 Club on West 52nd Street is the most famous surviving example of the latter category: it had a wine cellar behind a false wall, a system of trapdoors for dumping bottles into the sewers during raids, and a guest list that included newspaper editors, politicians, and the occasional police commissioner.
01
PDT (Please Don't Tell)
East Village, New York$$$Hidden / Reservation Required
PDT is accessed through a phone booth inside a hot dog restaurant on St. Marks Place, and it was one of the bars that launched the modern speakeasy revival when it opened in 2007. The format is self-consciously theatrical, but the cocktails are serious enough that the novelty becomes secondary after the first drink. Jim Meehan's programme built PDT into one of the world's best-regarded cocktail programmes. Reservations are essential and often booked weeks out.
Order: The Benton's Old Fashioned — bacon-fat-washed bourbon, one of the most copied cocktails of the last decade
02
Attaboy
Lower East Side, New York$$$No Menu / Walk-in
Attaboy operates out of the same space that Milk and Honey used before it — the most influential speakeasy of the modern era, a bar so intent on its no-publicity ethos that it never had a sign, rarely admitted strangers, and required a personal referral for your first visit. Attaboy kept the walk-in format but made it more accessible: no menu, bartenders make what they think you should drink based on a few questions. Walk past the unmarked door slowly. The small red light means you can enter.
Order: Tell the bartender a spirit and a general mood — they will handle the rest
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After Prohibition ended in 1933, the speakeasy as a concept did not simply disappear. It went quiet for several decades while legitimate bars reasserted themselves, but the underground bar — the place that was hard to find, that required some effort to get into, that rewarded insiders — never fully left American drinking culture. Private clubs, after-hours bars, and discreet basement establishments maintained the tradition through the postwar decades and into the 1970s and 1980s.
The modern revival, which most observers date to Sasha Petraske opening Milk and Honey in 1999, was driven by a different impulse: quality. The hidden bar format offered a way to control the room — no walk-ins, no tourists, no people ordering vodka sodas and talking loudly over the bartender. The result was a cocktail programme that could be taken seriously by people who took cocktails seriously. The concealment was the point, but not for legal reasons this time.
03
The Gibson
Old Street, London$$$Hidden / Reservation Only
London's most significant speakeasy-format bar, entered through an unmarked door in Old Street that leads down a staircase to a room of dark wood and leather banquettes. The Gibson has been refining its cocktail programme since 2011 and now produces some of the most technically accomplished drinks in London. The reservations-only format creates exactly the atmosphere the original speakeasies were chasing: a room where everyone present chose to be there.
Order: Whatever seasonal tasting menu they are running — it changes quarterly
04
Shady Pines Saloon
Darlinghurst, Sydney$$Basement / No Sign
Sydney's speakeasy scene developed a decade behind New York's but has caught up with characteristic Australian efficiency. Shady Pines is accessed through a basement in Darlinghurst with no visible signage — locals know it by the taxidermied animals and the sound of country music rising through the pavement. The whisky selection is one of the best in the city, and the bar has the unhurried atmosphere of a room that decided early on that it was not interested in the mainstream.
Order: Ask for their current recommendation from the American whisky selection
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The Best Modern Speakeasies We Recommend
The modern speakeasy has spread globally, with serious examples now operating in Tokyo, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and across Europe. Some use genuine hidden entrances. Others use the format more loosely — reservations-only, minimal signage, a deliberate remove from street-level accessibility. What distinguishes the best from the merely theatrical is that the concealment serves the quality of the experience rather than being the experience itself.
05
Bar Benfiddich
Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo$$$$Intimate / One Bartender
Hiroyasu Kayama grows most of his herbs and botanicals on a small farm and brings them to this nine-seat bar in Tokyo where he makes drinks that could not exist anywhere else. The room is cluttered with antique glassware and apothecary bottles. There is no menu — Kayama asks a few questions and builds something designed for you specifically. The bar operates most evenings but fills up early; showing up at opening is the reliable approach.
Order: Describe what you want to feel in forty minutes — he will build the drink accordingly
Death and Co's original New York location helped define the modern cocktail bar. The Denver outpost operates with the same ethos — no walk-ins, reservations preferred, cocktail list changed seasonally — in a space that manages to feel intimate despite its size. The programme here has developed its own identity separate from the New York original, with a stronger focus on American whisky and agave spirits. The best cocktail bar in Colorado and not particularly close.
Order: The current seasonal signature — it is always the most fully realised drink on the list
07
Candelaria
Le Marais, Paris$$$Taqueria Front / Bar Behind
Through the back of a taqueria in Le Marais, past the bar stools and the mezcal bottles, there is a door that leads to one of the best cocktail rooms in Paris. Candelaria is the bar that turned Parisian cocktail culture, which was overdue for reinvention. The focus is on agave spirits — tequila and mezcal — and the cocktails are built around them with a rigour that makes the secret-door format feel earned rather than gimmicky.
Order: The mezcal Negroni variation — the house spirit changes the drink entirely
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The history of speakeasy bars is really the history of what happens when drinking is treated as something worth protecting from dilution. During Prohibition, the dilution was legal. In the modern revival, the dilution is cultural: the mass-market bar experience that the hidden format was designed to escape. The best speakeasies today are not nostalgia acts. They are bars that use concealment as a curatorial tool, and the results justify the effort of finding them.
If you want to experience the format for the first time, go to PDT in New York or The Gibson in London. Both have the hidden entrance without the inaccessibility, and both make drinks that could hold their own in any room. That combination — secret door, serious cocktail — is what the original speakeasies were actually trying to achieve.
The classic cocktails every drinker should knowBefore you find the bar, know what to order. Our guide to the classic cocktail canon.
