The Best Places to Drink in Colombo

The Gentleman's Penicillin arrives smoked inside a carafe, which sets the tone pretty quickly. This cocktail bar inside Shangri-La Colombo leans hard into retro atmosphere, with deep blue seating, green bankers lamps, and a back bar lit by what must be hundreds of vintage filament bulbs. The drinks are riffs on classics, the kind that justify the extra step. A smart place to settle in when Colombo has worn you down.

A cocktail bar that happens to share space with a wood-fired kitchen, Gini keeps its drinks menu deliberately nameless, listing each cocktail as a short stack of ingredients: arrack, kithul palm, lime. Rum, passion fruit, vanilla. The indoor-outdoor room draws a crowd that comes for Sri Lankan small plates too, but the spare, confident drinks programme is its own argument. Named a 50 Discovery by The 50.

Arrack is the spine of almost every drink at Uncle's, a cocktail bar in Colombo that built its whole identity around Sri Lankan ingredients at a time when imported bottles were hard to come by anyway. The menu splits into Tropical and Boozy Big Boy Drinks, which is a categorization system that removes most of the guesswork. A laid-back, proudly local room that holds a 50 Discovery from The 50.