The 35 Best Places to Drink in Berlin

A cocktail bar on a Neukölln street lined with them, Wax On separates itself by running a rotary evaporator and centrifuge behind the bar, which is either deeply nerdy or deeply appealing depending on your crowd. The drinks stay close to the classics but veer off in odd, satisfying directions. It holds a spot on both Europe's 50 Best Bars and the World's 50 Best Bars lists, and the prices somehow don't reflect any of that.

1. The 50 #57 · The World's 50 Best Bars
2. The 50 #17 · Europe's 50 Best Bars
3. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

The neon sign outside reads "closed," which is either a joke or a filter, depending on how you look at it. This intimate cocktail bar on Brunnenstraße is serious enough that a queue forms anyway, coats go in the wardrobe (not over a chair), and nobody inside seems to mind the theater of getting in. The kind of place that makes Berlin feel like it invented the cocktail bar and let everyone else borrow the idea.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A glowing portrait of Samuel Beckett in the window is what you look for, and once inside you'll find two small, dimly lit rooms and a bar counter barely wide enough for two people to work behind without renegotiating their relationship. This Prenzlauer Berg cocktail bar has the feel of being invited into someone's living room, because in a way you have been: the couple who run it make hospitality feel less like a job and more like a genuine impulse.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Past the literal green door in Schoeneberg, this narrow cocktail bar is lined in gingham and faux wood grain, with a wavy wall broken by a glowing drinks ledge, the whole thing sitting somewhere between a 1970s living room and a perfectly serious bar program. The long oak counter runs nearly wall to wall, and the cocktail list is thick enough to raise an eyebrow. The house slogan, "the power of positive drinking," does a lot of work setting expectations.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery
2. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery
2. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

The sushi counter fills up fast, which tells you something about a restaurant that also runs a full contemporary kitchen. VOX sits inside the Grand Hyatt near Potsdamer Platz, a wide-open modern dining room where the menu splits between Japanese sushi and European-leaning plates, à la carte or as a set. The bar behind it stocks a whisky collection broad enough to require a quiet moment of reflection before ordering.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Dusky pink walls and a palm frond mural set the mood at this Charlottenburg cocktail bar, where everything is calibrated for the long sit-down. The team rotates the menu constantly, pulling inspiration from novels, songs, whatever they're into this season. Comfortable sofas or a front-row stool at the bar, your call. A Discovery on The 50 list.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg now houses this cocktail bar, where the kitchen-lab setup is visible through a large window and the gadgets are very much part of the show. Drinks lean technical, built around combinations like whisky with clarified mango and curry, and every cocktail can be ordered short or long. The room somehow reads as relaxed despite the science-fair ambition behind the bar.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

A kimchi popsicle floating in the house Michelada tells you everything you need to know about this cocktail bar in Mitte. The team behind a popular German-American-Korean street food operation opened it as a dedicated drinking spot, and the menu roams widely while Korean influences keep pulling it back somewhere specific. Boozy ice pops show up in summer, spiked with makgeolli rice wine, because of course they do.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

You follow pig tracks through a local pub called Kauz & Kiebitz, ring a doorbell, and suddenly you're in a speakeasy that leans into the truffle metaphor with dark wood, velvet, and gold without losing its sense of humor about any of it. Open four nights a week, Truffle Pig keeps the cocktail list inventive but approachable, the kind of bar where the room does the theatrics so the drinks don't have to. Named a Discovery by The 50.

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Spirited Awards 2026 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best New International Cocktail Bar – Europe

A cocktail bar above Café Einstein where the bartenders wear jacket and tie and seem to shake drinks in rhythm with the mellow jazz on the jukebox. The back bar holds what might be the most gin bottles you've seen in one place, with vodka, whisky, and tequila collections filling the adjoining rooms. The crowd skews older and bookish, the kind that actually reads the spirits menu.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Floor-to-ceiling windows face out onto Weserstraße, one of Neukölln's long, bar-every-other-door streets where someone is always playing music on the pavement. Tier is a cocktail bar done up in hunting-lodge-meets-art-deco, dim-lit and playing old rock, which makes it feel more settled than the DIY living-room spots around it. The neighborhood runs young and restless, and this is where they land when they want an actual bar.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The back bar looks like an apothecary, all premium bottles and small wooden drawers, which sets the tone for what follows. This intimate cocktail bar fits about thirty people under a bronze ceiling with banquette seating along the grey walls, but the right stool at the far end of the bar, where the drinks are actually assembled, is the seat to take. Small, serious, and easy to linger in.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Bird of paradise flowers in expensive vases, champagne in trough-sized ice buckets: Bar Amano does not pretend to be a dive. It's a hotel cocktail bar in Mitte with a lengthy list and bartenders happy to skip it entirely if you just tell them what you're drinking these days. The bay windows along the edge of the room are a good perch for watching Auguststraße do its thing.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Two wire-sculpture monkeys greet you at the bar inside Das Stue Hotel, which backs onto the Tiergarten and is one of the few places in Berlin where the unwritten dress code tilts toward "actual effort." The lobby flows in with its glass cases of wooden animal carvings and shoes, but the bar itself goes clean and spare, all glass walls and open courtyard. Berlin is a relaxed city; this place hasn't gotten the memo, which is exactly the point.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The owner built and decorated the room himself, then showed up in a waistcoat and bow tie to serve cocktails in it, which tells you almost everything about this cocktail bar in Kreuzberg. The space is comfortable rather than grand, with an upright piano at the back that gets used. It occupies an old German kneipe, and the bones of that neighborhood local are still very much present, which only makes the carefully made drinks feel more at home.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A fresco of a woman extending a cocktail with the words "Mon Cheri" covers one wall, and the plastered ceiling carvings look like they took someone's entire back problem to complete. This small cocktail bar near Stuttgarter Platz occupies what was, by local account, a former red-light establishment, though the art nouveau restoration has thoroughly rebranded the premises. Come for the room as much as the drink.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Silver chalices, a swizzle stick on the bar top, and a heavy cigar lighter in the bartender's hand set the tone at this Prenzlauer Berg cocktail bar. Smoking is legal in Berlin, and the team here leans into that with quiet theatrics. The technique behind the bar is precise and unhurried, the kind you watch without meaning to. A small, considered room where the drinks are taken seriously and the flourishes earn their place.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Tiffany lamps, glitter balls, and oil paintings share wall space with mounted boxes of trinkets, and somehow the whole mishmash holds together. Salut! is a neighbourhood bar on a Schöneberg street where graffitied apartment blocks meet boutique storefronts. Silent retro film clips play on the wall behind the bar, VW Beetles and bell-bottomed couples, scored only by whatever's on the stereo. The kind of place that feels like it's always been there.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A former greengrocer's shop turned cocktail bar, Saphire now trades in brushed stainless steel and low-slung cream banquettes rather than root vegetables. The menu runs deep through classics, but the house specialty called Züchtigungsphantasien, which translates loosely as "disciplinarian fantasies," is what most people end up ordering. It's a berry mojito situation, which is either reassuring or a mild anticlimax depending on what you were expecting.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A granite bar the size of a small continent anchors this cocktail bar tucked around an internal courtyard in a townhouse that gives nothing away from the street. The room runs dark leather and dim light, and the menu leans into what it calls "restorative" drinks, fizzes and long pours served in bulbous wine glasses. The bleak façade is almost the point, keeping out anyone who needs a sign to find it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The narrow room runs almost wall to wall with bar counter, lined with leather stools and framed by booth seating at each end. Victoria is a sleek cocktail bar on Potsdamer Strasse, a stretch that doesn't exactly telegraph "upmarket lounge," which may be why the crowd that found it feels faintly proprietary about the place. Dark wood panels, modern art, low light, the general sense that someone thought hard about this.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Named for the Buñuel film where dinner guests find themselves mysteriously unable to leave, this Kreuzberg neighborhood bar operates on exactly the same principle. You go for one drink. You stay for several, helped along by the fact that the Italian restaurant next door will send food over. Nobody seems to mind being stuck in the cul-de-sac off Oranienplatz. That's rather the point.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A red velvet curtain parts and you're suddenly in a dimly lit, jazz-soaked room with clay walls hung in black-and-white photos of the man himself. Gainsbourg is a cocktail bar named after Serge, styled as an "American" bar but feeling more like a Paris side street, which suits the namesake just fine. The hedge-lined terrace works on a warm night, but the real pull is the moody interior.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Prints of all 43 U.S. presidents line the walls, a nod to the straw polls the Paris Harry's ran during American elections. This cocktail bar inside the Grand Hotel Esplanade leans hard into the Parisian original, borrowing the dancing flies logo and the college pennants behind the bar. It has all the right props and none of the patina, which is the unavoidable fate of a 1988 replica trying to out-charm a place that opened before World War One.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A wall of squashed Coca-Cola cans, arranged with a precision that suggests someone had strong feelings about recycling, sets the tone at this Friedrichshain cocktail bar. The curved ceiling follows the line of the bar counter below, bare brick runs to the back of the room, and the whole place manages to look deliberately rough without trying too hard. The drinks, despite the edgy trappings, lean toward the classics.

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide