Editorial
The World's 50 Best Bars is the most influential list in the cocktail world, and it is also the list most misunderstood by the people who read it. Every year when the rankings are announced, the bar world debates the inclusions, the exclusions, and the curious movement of bars up and down the list. We have been reading these debates for over a decade. Here is a clear-eyed look at what the World's 50 Best Bars actually measures, why it matters, and which bars on the current list justify the journey.
The list is produced annually by William Reed Business Media and uses a voting Academy of roughly 700 drinks industry professionals worldwide. Each voter submits a ranked list of their top seven bars. Voters cannot nominate bars in their own country, and they cannot nominate bars with which they have a direct commercial relationship. The Academy composition is updated annually and is not published in full, which is both the list's greatest protection against manipulation and its most common criticism.
The structural implications of this system are worth understanding. Bars that are well-networked within the international bartending community — bars whose owners and bartenders travel to industry events, host international bartenders, and build relationships with drinks professionals in other cities — have a structural advantage over equally excellent bars that operate locally without international visibility. This is why London, New York, Barcelona, and Tokyo produce a disproportionate number of entries: not because every bar in those cities is superior to every bar elsewhere, but because those cities have higher concentrations of internationally connected bartenders.
The honest answer about which 50 Best bars are worth a pilgrimage is: most of them. The bars that reach the list through the independent peer vote are, by definition, bars that a large number of well-travelled drinks professionals think are worth visiting. The question of whether any individual bar is worth a trip from your specific location is a function of the flight cost, your own priorities, and how seriously you take bar experiences as travel motivation. For a significant number of people reading this, the answer is: fairly seriously.
Our picks for the bars currently on the list that we consider non-negotiable — the ones where the experience of visiting will add something to your understanding of what bars can be — are weighted towards consistency over novelty, and towards bars where the quality of the work itself justifies the attention rather than the marketing around it.
The World's 50 Best is a peer-voted list, which means it reflects the bars that the voting Academy knows about. The bars it has not yet found are the ones that operate outside the established networks of the international drinks world: the outstanding neighbourhood bar in a second-tier city, the emerging bar in a market where the Academy has limited representation, the bar whose owners have chosen not to pursue the kind of international visibility that generates votes.
This is where editorial guides like this one have a different value proposition from the 50 Best. We can recommend bars in cities and categories where the peer-vote structure has structural blind spots. A hidden gem bar in Chicago or a craft beer bar in Edinburgh is never going to appear on the World's 50 Best list, but it can appear in our guides and earn a recommendation that means something to the person who walks through the door. For a wider view, our guide to the most famous bars in the world profiles 20 bars that earned their reputations outside the awards circuit entirely, and our 2025 world ranking covers bars the editors consider essential this year.
The World's 50 Best Bars is the most useful single resource for identifying bars that have earned sustained peer recognition in the international drinks community. It is not a complete picture of the world's best bars — no peer-voted list can be — and it over-represents certain cities and under-represents others. But the bars that reach it consistently deserve to be there, and visiting them is almost always worthwhile. Use it alongside editorial guides, local recommendations, and your own willingness to explore beyond the obvious list entries. For a deeper analysis of how the voting academy and judging methodology actually work, read our detailed breakdown of how the World's 50 Best Bars are judged.
The bars above span different cities, price points, and styles, and all are on or adjacent to the current World's 50 Best list. Each one rewards the effort of finding it. That is, ultimately, what any bar list is trying to tell you.
James has been tracking the World's 50 Best Bars list since its third year. He has visited over 80 percent of the bars that have ever appeared on it and has strong opinions about which ones justified the journey.