Editorial
Every city that markets itself primarily as a drinking destination tends to be the most overrated bar city in its region. The most overrated bar cities share a common feature: they have built their reputations on atmosphere, excess, and spectacle rather than on the quality of what is actually in the glass. This is our honest assessment of the cities that consistently fail serious drinkers — and the better alternatives for each one.
Las Vegas has extraordinary nightlife, spectacular venue design, and some of the most talented hospitality operators in the world. What it does not have is good cocktails, at any price point. The economics of the Strip disincentivise quality — a venue making $40,000 in cover charges on a Friday night has no reason to spend money on spirits. The result is a city where you can pay $24 for a cocktail that would embarrass a mid-tier hotel bar in any other city.
Ibiza and Cancún are not really bar cities. They are party infrastructure — the drinks exist to enable the music, the dancing, and the social performance, and nobody serious about what is in the glass would go to either of them for that reason. The problem arises when visitors expect something more and discover that the cocktail programmes in both places are almost uniformly awful. There is an exception in Ibiza worth knowing about.
Dubai has the money to build world-class bar programmes but consistently spends it on the wrong things. The city's bar culture prizes spectacle — rooftop views, gold-leaf garnishes, celebrity-endorsed menus — over the quality of what is in the glass. The result is a city full of bars that look extraordinary in photographs and disappoint on the palate. The exceptions are clustered in the DIFC and Alserkal Avenue, where the hospitality operators have made a different set of choices.
For everyone disappointed by Las Vegas, the alternative is New Orleans — a city with genuine cocktail history, neighbourhood bars that charge fair prices, and the Sazerac as a local invention rather than a tourist prop. For everyone who went to Ibiza for the party and found themselves wanting a drink, the answer is Barcelona — forty minutes away by plane, with a cocktail bar scene that is among the best in Europe.
The most overrated bar cities are overrated for a consistent reason: they have built their identities around drinking as performance rather than drinking as pleasure. Las Vegas, Ibiza, and Cancún are extraordinary for what they are. They are simply not bar cities in any meaningful sense, and visitors who arrive expecting cocktail culture will leave disappointed.
The alternative is almost always a 45-minute flight away. Browse our full city directory to find the real drinking destinations, and check the most underrated bar cities for the cities that actually deliver what the overrated ones only promise.
James has spent fifteen years going to the wrong bars in famous cities so you do not have to. He has strong opinions about the gap between a city's drinking reputation and its drinking reality, and believes the most honest thing a bar guide can do is tell you which cities to skip.