The 66 Best Places to Drink in Australia

Jacketed bartenders with accents spanning small Slovakian towns to big Italian cities set the tone at this cocktail bar in The Rocks. The hospitality runs flamboyant, the kind where staff practically compete for your affection and the host seats everyone like a penthouse guest. Named one of the World's 50 Best Bars, Maybe Sammy drinks from a European hotel-bar playbook that Sydney had no idea it was missing.

Andrew McConnell's fine dining room inside the grand Cavendish House on Russell Street turns on an open fire grill and dry-aged Victorian and South Australian beef, which landed Gimlet a spot on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list. The room manages to feel glamorous without feeling stiff, and the wine list reads like someone actually thought about what goes with the food rather than just buying everything.

An extensive vinyl collection spins through a high-end sound system, and the whole bar is arranged around taking that seriously, kissa-style, the way listening bars in Japan are. ANTE is a drinks-forward spot in Newtown where the sake list runs deep, with producer notes detailed enough to actually teach you something. It rewards a slow, curious approach to the menu rather than a quick round, which is either a warning or a recommendation depending on your Thursday night.

Tucked into a Melbourne shopping complex in a way that makes passersby do a double-take, Byrdi is a cocktail bar built around seasonality and local ingredients handled with the kind of precision that blurs the line between bar and kitchen lab. The team behind Singapore's Operation Dagger runs the show, and the drinks follow an almost culinary logic. It landed on the World's 50 Best Bars list, which tells you the curious head-twist is worth acting on.

Champagne sabrage lessons are on the curriculum at this quietly chic Fitzroy wine bar, which says something about the crowd's commitment. The wine list is the real point, organized by style and leaning into macerated whites, orange wines, and chilled reds alongside the expected classics. The cocktail list is small and a little kooky, which is exactly right. Everything, down to the coffee beans, is sourced with the kind of care that borders on obsessive.

A bar built around a bottling operation is an unusual anchor, but PS40 commits: the house sodas, made from local ingredients with no preservatives, drive the whole menu. The bush tonic alone runs through Peruvian cinchona bark, lemon myrtle, and native lemongrass. Cocktails pair those sodas with equally niche spirits, and the list reads like a festival lineup. Find the entrance down Skittle Lane, which feels about right.

A mezcal cocktail bar wedged into a Council Place garage so small it might have previously housed a single hatchback. Cantina OK is the opposite of Sydney's big-shoulder waterfront bars, the ones that eye your footwear suspiciously. Sandals, cowboy hats, and ball gowns all get waved through here, and the agave list runs deep enough that you'll stop pretending you know what you want and just ask.

Tucked into a laneway between downtown Sydney and Surry Hills, Alberto's Lounge is a late-night wine bar that has made a home in a stretch of city the city forgot, all carparks and gloomy office blocks. The room fills fast, queues forming by six on Fridays, so a booking is less optional than it sounds. Walk-ins aren't turned away, but patience helps. The kind of place you stay longer than planned.

The Art Deco fixtures cast a warm amber glow over off-white walls and chestnut wood, and the whole room reads like a 1950s New York neighbourhood joint that somehow landed in Carlton. Capitano is an Italian bar where the drinks are the point, though the pasta and pizza pull their weight too. Difford's Guide gives it five stars, which for a corner spot dressed this modestly is a mild plot twist.

Two large communal tables do the socializing for you at this Carlton cocktail bar, where the menu shifts a few times a week because only a limited run of each drink gets made. The name nods to the French for "beautiful friend," and the room takes that seriously, feeling less like a bar you've wandered into and more like a dinner party someone else is hosting. A good fit for people who don't mind talking to strangers.

Psychedelic decor, dripping candles, and exposed brick on Enmore Road, all in service of a single obsession: the martini. Bar Planet is a cocktail bar that has essentially written a constitution around one drink, using its own house spirit and offering it neat, miniature, long with soda, or dirty with seaweed and brine. Newtown approves, predictably. The 50 gave it a Discovery listing, which tracks for a bar this committed to doing one thing its own way.

A basement cocktail bar on Peel Street where the drinks menu is divided by landscape: coast, hills, valleys. The idea is that Adelaide's terroir belongs in a glass as much as a bottle, so the team leans into seasonal local produce and genuine technique to make the argument. The crowd that's figured this out tends to come back often enough to be called regulars. Named a Discovery by The 50.

A basement rum bar beneath Old Mate's Place, Old Love's takes its tiki cues from before the genre went full plastic flamingo. The team's fixation is Caribbean rum, and the rest of the sugarcane world gets its due as well. One co-owner literally wrote the book on the stuff, a guide to what's on offer with cocktail pairings included. Descend when you want someone to make a genuinely considered drink decision on your behalf.

A nondescript office block on Clarence Street hides a cocktail bar split between a speakeasy interior and a rooftop terrace that leans hard into treehouse energy. The drinks are experimental in the good way, butter fat-washed whisky and house-made croissant garnishes without a trace of self-consciousness about it. Cheesesteak riffs soak up the evening. Getting there feels like a small conspiracy, which is clearly the point.

Twenty-four seats tucked inside a heritage building in Chinatown, One or Two is a late-night cocktail bar that borrows its soul from the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: warm wood, minimal fuss, the feeling that nothing is permanent and you should probably order another drink. The bartender behind it modeled the whole thing on a Tokyo midnight-diner TV series, and the vibe tracks, intimate and a little cinematic.

A back bar stocked with around 350 bottles, ten new ones arriving each week, tells you everything about what The Elysian Whisky Bar is trying to do. This Fitzroy whisky bar leans hard into rare and unusual bottlings, with flights for the curious and a proper cocktail list for anyone dragged along by an enthusiast. A bar food menu rounds things out, so no one has to drink on an empty stomach while debating single malts.

Dark wood, mismatched velvet, and leather sofas in a muted-light room that invites you to arrive early and leave late. Black Pearl is a cocktail bar on Brunswick Street that most drinks people treat as the main reason to come to Fitzroy at all. The list is short and inventive, boutique beers cover the non-cocktail moods, and bar food handles the rest. Difford's Guide rates it five stars, which tells you where the serious drinkers end up.

Frozen margaritas for ten dollars in the Surry Hills sun is a strong opening argument. Tio's Cerveceria is a Mexican-leaning bar in the neighborhood's easy-going pocket, with an outdoor setup that earns its keep on a warm afternoon. The mezcal list runs deep, the Michelada is built with enough red pepper to qualify as a wellness decision, and the whole place has the loose, no-fuss energy of somewhere that has quietly figured out exactly what it wants to be.

The centrepiece is a long juniper-blue bar that keeps your eyes on the bartenders and nowhere else, which is exactly the point. Eileen's is the Sydney cocktail bar from Australian gin brand Four Pillars, and it sidesteps the usual branded-venue trap of feeling like a pop-up in disguise. The room is minimal and deliberate, the drinks list built around their own spirits. Expect gin in most of its forms, done with more care than novelty.

A basement at the end of an alley off Clarence Street, the kind of door you'd walk past twice before finding. Inside, 456 bottles of mostly single malts climb a seven-tier back-bar that basically functions as wallpaper. It's a whisky-forward cocktail bar, serious without being solemn, and the queue outside on any given night suggests the city has quietly figured out where the door is.

There's no menu at The Everleigh, just a bartender who asks what you're drinking and means it. This upstairs cocktail bar on Gertrude Street runs on hand-cracked ice, fresh juice, and the kind of unhurried service that makes you feel like someone's actually paying attention. The team came up through Milk & Honey in New York, and the influence shows, with the rigidity quietly left behind on another continent.

Scarlet velvet curtains frame the main bar like a stage set, which is either a bold choice or a perfectly accurate one, given the theatrics of serious cocktail-making. This is a cocktail bar spread over three floors, with the ground level doing most of the heavy lifting. The name nods to the year the word cocktail was first defined in print, so the whole room is a love letter to the form. Vintage shakers, period details, but no stuffiness.

A cocktail bar in Darlinghurst where the drinks arrive with a bit of performance baked in, not just poured. The menu moves between classics and quietly tweaked versions of classics, the kind of place where the bartender knows why a recipe changed in 1947 and will tell you if you ask. A devoted local crowd has kept it busy for years, which is its own kind of argument.

Dark red banquettes, ceiling fans, black-and-white photos on the walls, and a vintage football table set the tone at this elegantly retro cocktail bar above Porteño in Surry Hills. Named for tango legend Carlos Gardel, it leans hard into its Argentine identity with a six-page all-Argentine wine list, more than twenty available by the glass. Bar snacks keep things light if the asado downstairs feels like a commitment.

Velvet in every direction and a semi-covered terrace that lets you smoke while pretending you're in Manhattan: Hemmesphere is a cocktail bar that has been setting the Sydney standard since before most of its regulars knew what a coupe glass was. It started as a members-only room, dropped the velvet rope without dropping the velvet, and now just lets anyone in to enjoy well-made drinks and the kind of room that makes you order a second.

A spiral staircase drops you into a basement rum bar done up with faded wallpaper, plantation chairs, and tropical plants, all of it named for Julio Lobo, the sugar king of Havana who lost everything to Castro. The CBD address is quietly absurd, tucked next to an unassuming Chinese restaurant on Clarence Street, but downstairs the Caribbean fantasy holds. The list leans deep into rum, and the room rewards lingering.

Red velvet curtains and Victorian mahogany panelling inside what was once a Greek restaurant: LOW 302 is a Darlinghurst neighbourhood bar that layers its charm on thick without feeling like it's trying. Local bands play a few nights a week, craft beers and a short cocktail list cover the classics, and the scavenged furniture gives the whole room the feeling of a very well-curated skip.

A 4am license is already reason enough, but Palmer and Co earns it. Tucked into an arched brick basement down a back alley, this Prohibition-era cocktail bar from the Merivale group goes all-in on the speakeasy concept: floor mosaics, period glassware, aged mirrors, and enough taxidermy to make the late Mr. Palmer feel at home. The kind of place where staying until closing time is less a decision than a natural consequence.

A cocktail bar in Potts Point where the menu leans on classic riffs and the room leans on black leather, cabinets of cocktail ephemera, and a rock 'n' roll soundtrack. Liquid nitrogen turns up in a few of the drinks, including a martini shaken with the cold stuff. The nitrogen trolley that once made tableside rounds now sits marooned in the middle of the room, a victim of local legislation, which is perhaps the most interesting piece of bar furniture in Sydney.

A cocktail bar on level three of a Bourke Street building, reached by a creaky elevator that fits seven at a push and opens onto a room dressed in full garden-party drag: wicker, pastel, and waitstaff in tennis whites. The drinks lean fruity and come in jugs, which is either charming or a warning depending on your afternoon. Melbourne's day-drinking set has been making the ascent for a long time.