Editorial
The new york vs los angeles bars debate is less settled than people think, and I have skin in it. I live in LA. I go to New York four times a year specifically for bars. The honest truth is that these cities have different strengths and the right answer depends entirely on what you are looking for. New York wins on craft and density. Los Angeles wins on outdoor drinking, natural wine, and the ease with which a good bar integrates into a good evening. Here is the category breakdown with the bars that make each city's argument.
Los Angeles has significantly closed the gap on New York cocktail culture in the past five years. The Silver Lake and Downtown clusters now produce programs that would have been unimaginable in LA a decade ago. But New York still has more bars at the top end of technical excellence, and the culture around those bars is more serious. For cocktails specifically, New York still wins.
This is not a close comparison. LA has 312 days of sunshine per year and a culture built around outdoor living. The rooftop bar scene, the patio culture, and the ability to drink outside comfortably nine months of the year gives LA a category that New York simply cannot compete in at the same level. The views from LA's best rooftop bars are also genuinely impressive in a way that differs from New York's skyline but does not lose to it.
Los Angeles now has the best natural wine bar scene outside of Paris and London. The Silver Lake and Los Feliz clusters have produced a concentration of bars focused on low-intervention wine, fermented beverages, and creative non-alcoholic options that no other American city is matching. New York has good natural wine bars. LA has more of them and they are, on average, more interesting.
Los Angeles runs on a different schedule from New York and the bar scene reflects this. Most serious cocktail bars in LA close at midnight. The after-midnight crowd in LA heads to clubs rather than bars. New York does not have this problem. If late-night bar drinking is the goal, New York wins and it is not close.
New York wins on cocktail excellence, late night, density, and the kind of bar culture where you can walk from one great bar to the next without a car. Los Angeles wins on outdoor drinking, natural wine, rooftops, sunshine, and the overall quality of life that surrounds the drinking. Both cities have bars that belong on any serious drinker's lifetime list.
My honest recommendation: go to New York in the autumn and spend three days in the East Village and Lower East Side. Go to LA in March and spend two evenings in Silver Lake and one on a rooftop in West Hollywood. Neither trip will disappoint you if you know where to go, and this article exists so that you do.
Marcus covers West Coast bar culture and splits his time between Silver Lake and Downtown Los Angeles. He visits New York four times a year specifically for the cocktail bars and still thinks LA wins on rooftops.