Editorial
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. For a comprehensive look at every major awards programme and what winning each one actually means for a bar's trajectory, read our complete guide to bar of the year awards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
James has been tracking bar awards and the industry politics behind them since 2011. He writes about bar culture and the drinks industry for several publications and has a strong opinion about which awards actually mean something.