Bar awards are the most visible currency in the cocktail world, and they are also the most misunderstood. When a bar is named the World's Best or wins a Spirited Award at Tales of the Cocktail, that recognition lands differently depending on how the award works, who votes for it, and whether the voting process is genuinely independent. We have been following bar awards for long enough to have a clear view of which ones carry real weight and which are primarily marketing vehicles.
The Major Bar Awards and How Their Voting Works
The World's 50 Best Bars, produced by William Reed Business Media, uses an Academy of roughly 700 industry professionals worldwide who each submit a ranked list of their personal recommendations. Voters cannot vote for bars in their own country or for bars with which they have a commercial relationship. The result is not perfect — voters are human, they have networks, they have biases — but the structural independence of the vote is real. A bar cannot buy its way onto the 50 Best list in the way it can buy placement in a magazine feature.
The Spirited Awards, run by Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, uses a combination of public voting and industry judging panels depending on the category. The public vote categories are more susceptible to organised campaigns by bars with large social followings. The judged categories carry more weight. Tales of the Cocktail is also sponsored by spirit brands, which creates structural complexity in some of the spirit-specific awards, though the bar-focused categories remain credible.
01
The Dead Rabbit
Financial District, NYC
$$$
Multiple Award Winner
Jack McGarry and Sean Muldoon's Financial District bar has won more international awards than any other bar in New York, including multiple Best Bar in the World nods from both the World's 50 Best and Spirited Awards. The awards are deserved: the cocktail programme in the upstairs Parlour is consistently among the best in the city, the Irish pub downstairs is the rare hotel-adjacent bar that feels genuinely local, and the menu concept — illustrated pop-up books changed annually — is without peer.
Order: A flip or a punch upstairs. A Guinness and Jameson downstairs, if you need to decompress.
02
Dante
Greenwich Village, NYC
$$$
World's Best 2019
Named the World's Best Bar in 2019 by the 50 Best Academy, Dante's win surprised some in the industry who expected a more technically demanding cocktail programme to take the top spot. The award recognised instead that Dante does something harder: it serves excellent cocktails at scale, in a room that welcomes everyone from tourists to regulars, at prices that are not exclusively for the expense-account crowd. The negroni programme alone has been worth multiple return visits.
Order: The Garibaldi (Campari and freshly juiced blood orange) or the Negroni Sbagliato.
03
Himkok
Storgata, Oslo
$$$
Nordic / Distillery-Bar
Oslo's most internationally recognised bar has held a consistent position in the World's 50 Best for years and won multiple Spirited Awards in the European categories. The awards have followed the bar's farm-to-glass programme, which uses house-distilled spirits, foraged ingredients, and Nordic fermentation techniques in cocktails that taste like nowhere else. The fact that Oslo is not a traditionally recognised cocktail city makes Himkok's sustained international recognition more meaningful, not less.
Order: The Aquavit Martini or any cocktail featuring their house-distilled spirits and foraged bitters.
The best cocktail bars in the world
Our editorial pick of the cocktail bars worth travelling for, across 60 cities. Award-winners included on merit.
Explore cocktail bars
What Bar Awards Cannot Measure
The structural limitation of every bar award is that it measures reputation as much as current quality. A bar that won the World's Best title three years ago retains that reputation in the minds of the voters who visited it three years ago, even if the programme has evolved or declined since then. The World's 50 Best addresses this with a retirement policy — bars that reach the top spot are inducted into the Hall of Fame and cannot win again — but the fundamental lag between quality and recognition remains.
Awards also measure only the bars that industry voters know about. The best neighbourhood bar in Cleveland is never going to appear on an international award shortlist, not because it is not excellent but because no international industry voter has been there. The most useful bar awards are the ones that actively extend their voter base beyond the obvious global capitals — New York, London, Barcelona, Tokyo — and seek out recommendations from bartenders in cities that are not traditional stops on the drinks world circuit.
04
Kwant
Mayfair, London
$$$$
Newcomer Award Winner
Erik Lorincz's Mayfair bar received immediate recognition from the industry upon opening — a newcomer award from the 50 Best and a strong Spirited Awards showing in its first eligible year. The speed of recognition reflects both the calibre of the programme and the fact that Lorincz was already well-known in the industry from his years at the American Bar at The Savoy. The bar earned it: the drinks are technically immaculate, the room is beautiful, and the service has the precision of someone who has spent decades thinking about hospitality.
Order: Any of the cocktails built around the bar's house-infused spirits or the seasonal tasting flight.
05
Katana Kitten
West Village, NYC
$$$
World's Best Bar 2022
Masahiro Urushido's bar won the World's Best Bar award in 2022 — less than four years after opening — through a combination of exceptional programme quality and genuine industry respect. The Japanese whisky highball service here is the most technically precise in New York, and the cocktail menu bridges Japanese sensibility and New York energy in a way that feels authentic rather than borrowed. The award was not a surprise to anyone who had visited; it was overdue.
Order: The Nikka From the Barrel highball or the Katana Kitten signature (shochu, yuzu, ginger).
Weekly editorial
The bars worth going to, weekly.
One email per week. The bars our editors are recommending right now, across 60 cities worldwide.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
The Awards That Actually Matter to Bartenders
Ask a working bartender which award they pay most attention to and the answer, in our experience, is consistently the Spirited Awards Best American Bartender or the equivalent Tales of the Cocktail regional bartender awards. These are peer recognition — industry professionals voting for other industry professionals — and carry a different kind of weight than a consumer-facing list. The bars attached to award-winning bartenders tend to be worth visiting, not because the award guarantees quality but because the peer respect that generates the award tends to reflect genuine standing in the craft.
06
Existing Conditions
Greenwich Village, NYC
$$$
Science-Led / Peer Recognised
Dave Arnold won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Programme — one of the few bar awards that uses a truly independent judging process comparable to food awards — and the recognition was for the kind of work that peer-voted awards also tend to recognise: sustained innovation, genuine contribution to the field, and a programme that influences how other bartenders think about their work. Existing Conditions embodies those qualities in a neighbourhood bar format.
Order: The Corn n' Oil Daiquiri or whatever the current centrifuged clarification special is.
07
Lyaness
South Bank, London
$$$$
Multiple Award Winner / Hotel
Ryan Chetiyawardana has won more peer-voted awards in the industry than almost any other bartender working today — including multiple Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards and consistent 50 Best recognition for his various bars. Lyaness, his Sea Containers hotel bar on the South Bank, maintains the quality that generates those awards: ingredient-led cocktail thinking, theatrical presentation that serves the drink rather than obscuring it, and a team trained to a standard that reflects the bar's international recognition.
Order: The current season's signature serve or the house negroni variation.
08
Paradiso
El Born, Barcelona
$$$
World's Best 2021
Giacomo Giannotti's watermelon-door bar in the Born neighbourhood was named the World's Best Bar in 2021. The award recognised a cocktail programme that places equal weight on narrative, technique, and flavour — each drink tells a story, and the story is always secondary to the drink being excellent. Paradiso's ranking has remained in the top five since, which is the most reliable signal an award can send: not a one-year fluke, but sustained standing in the peer community that votes for it.
Order: The Enigma cocktail or whatever the current signature tasting progression includes.
Discover the bars worth finding independently
Our hidden gems guide — the bars that never appear on sponsored lists and reward the effort of finding them.
Explore hidden gems
Our Verdict: Use Awards as Starting Points, Not Endpoints
The most useful way to engage with bar awards is as a discovery tool rather than a definitive ranking. The World's 50 Best list tells you which bars have strong enough reputations in the international industry to earn peer recognition — that is valuable information, even if the precise ranking is debatable. The Spirited Awards shortlists identify bartenders who are highly regarded by their peers — visiting their bars is worthwhile even if they did not win. The James Beard bar award identifies sustained programme quality rather than annual popularity.
Use the awards to find bars you have not tried. Then visit them with your own criteria. The award will have got you through the door. What happens after that is between you and whoever is behind the bar.
The World's 50 Best Bars explained
A deeper look at the most influential bar list in the world — how it works, what it measures, and which bars on it are genuinely worth a trip.
Read the explainer
