Editorial
We tracked every major bar award from 2018 to 2023 — World's 50 Best Bars, the Spirited Awards, Bar World 100, Drinks International's annual survey, Tales of the Cocktail recognition, and a dozen regional programmes — and cross-referenced which bars appear most frequently across all of them. These are the most awarded bars in the world right now. Not by any single list, but by the full weight of global industry recognition combined.
A handful of bars have achieved something remarkable: consistent top-10 placement across multiple award cycles, recognition from both peer voters and independent critics, and sustained quality through ownership changes, pandemic closures, and the inevitable staff turnover that kills lesser programs. These are not flash-in-the-pan openings. They are institutions.
Below the absolute elite, there is a tier of bars that have placed in the top 10 of at least one major global list more than three times in the past five years. These are bars whose quality is genuinely sustained — not a one-year anomaly driven by a strong PR push or a particularly diligent voter recruitment campaign.
These bars have not yet accumulated the multi-year record of the entries above, but their award trajectory is steep enough that they will almost certainly dominate the next five years of rankings. We watch them closely and recommend visiting now, before the queues grow.
The most awarded bars in the world share three characteristics: they have a clear point of view, they execute it consistently over years rather than months, and the people running them stay long enough for their approach to mature. Award-chasing bars — the ones that open with an obvious 50 Best strategy and a media push — rarely sustain their position. The bars above earned their recognition by being exceptional to their actual guests first, and the awards followed.
If you visit any of these bars, do not go expecting a flawless theatrical experience. Go expecting a drink made by someone who knows exactly what they are doing, served in a room designed with care. That is what the awards are actually recognising.
James tracks global bar industry recognition as a hobby that became a profession. He has visited 47 of the last 50 World's Best Bars list entries and has opinions about which ones deserved their ranking and which benefited from geography.