Editorial
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. Many of today's most extraordinary drinking experiences — from a bar accessible only by boat to one entered through a phone booth — appear in our guide to the most unique bars in the world.
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.
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.
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. For a curated ranking of venues that get this right, see our guide to the best speakeasy bars in the world.
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.
James has been drinking his way through New York since 2009 and has a particular interest in the history of American bar culture. He has visited every significant speakeasy operating in Manhattan and has opinions about all of them.