The 25 Best Places to Drink and Do in Indonesia

The sand here is pink, not as a metaphor but as a geological fact: crushed red coral mixing with white sand produces a color that looks like a filter someone forgot to turn off. Part of Komodo National Park, the beach sits among rugged islands whose hues shift through the seasons, and the water below is clear enough that snorkeling reveals the coral responsible for the whole spectacle. Named to The World's 50 Best Beaches.

The name splits into Modern and haus, the Indonesian word for thirst, which tells you most of what you need to know about the vibe. This cocktail bar sits above a French restaurant in Senopati, laid out more like a living room than a bar, with no real wall between guests and the people making drinks. It landed at number twelve on Asia's 50 Best Bars and took the Best New Opening award. The mid-century furniture and the contemporary pours in hand make for a quietly confident combination.

Zine-style cocktail menus are a choice, and at this bar inside the Grand Hyatt Jakarta it mostly works because the drinks behind it do too. Cosmo Pony is the Singapore group Jigger and Pony's first outpost abroad, and the room leans into mid-century lounge with marble, brass, and enough warmth to feel more like an evening salon than a hotel pit stop. Fruit-forward cocktails nod to Jakarta's old trading-port roots. It holds a spot on Asia's 50 Best Bars.

The Smoky Martini arrives under a cloche and exits in a cloud, which tells you everything about the room's ambitions. This hotel cocktail bar in South Jakarta deals in Art Deco surroundings, a live jazz band most evenings, and a menu routed through New York cocktail history. It holds a spot on Asia's 50 Best Bars. The crowd tends toward well-dressed and unhurried, the kind that orders a second round without checking the time.

Fourteen seats, walk-ins only, and a strict no-smoking policy in a city where that's almost a radical act. Carrots Bar is a tiny subterranean cocktail bar tucked into the basement of Fairgrounds SCBD, where the menu rotates and organizes its drinks by potency rather than spirit. It landed on Asia's 50 Best Bars, which is about right for a room this small with ambitions this clear. Go early, or accept the sidewalk.

The name means "five" in Sanskrit, a nod to the five pillars the bar is built around: food, drink, music, hospitality, and design. It's a cocktail bar near Jakarta's business district with a farm-to-table mindset that runs all the way into the glass, sourcing from local farms to put Indonesian twists on classics. A margarita arrives with curry leaf; a Negroni riff leans on pandan. Asia's 50 Best Bars has taken notice.

A skylight cuts through raw concrete and steel beams in this South Jakarta cocktail bar, giving it the calm of a Brooklyn loft dropped into Kebayoran Baru. The plush armchairs are clearly load-bearing, structurally speaking. Drinks lean familiar but land with a quiet detour, the kind of place where a regular's offhand request becomes a menu item. It holds a spot on Asia's 50 Best Bars.

Deer antlers punctuate the chandeliers at this dim, leather-heavy cocktail bar on the second floor of Semarang's Bowery Building, where the mood lands somewhere between jazz club and cigar lounge. Live music and a serious selection of rare spirits are both reliably on offer, and the cigar menu gets equal billing. The kind of place where you sink into an armchair and stop watching the time.

A Mexican bar and dining spot dropped into Seminyak's party circuit, Motel Mexicola leans hard into the fantasy: tropical colors, agave spirits in several forms, and cocktails with names that dare you to order them out loud. The drinks list runs from mezcal to a coconut mojito served with a prosecco chaser on the side. Tacos and churros keep things moving. It's the kind of place that fills up fast and shows no signs of guilt about it.

Low-slung sofas of recycled tropical wood and the vague feeling of a colonial planter's club set the mood at this cosy cocktail lounge in Ubud. The bar team distils rice wine, ferments fruit, and makes their own vermouth and bitters, so the drinks are less "local ingredients" as a tagline and more the whole point. Seasonal Balinese fruits and vegetables turn up in every glass, which sounds like a lot until the first sip.

An amphitheater curve of antique shutters frames the Indian Ocean sunset, which is either a coincidence or the whole point. Potato Head is a beach bar in Seminyak where the cocktails are built to a precision you'd expect somewhere without sand between your toes, then quietly spiked with local ingredients to remind you where you are. They've cut all single-use plastic too, serving drinks in coconut shells and reusing citrus husks for syrups.

Hand-cut ice and thirty-plus signatures behind a discreet door in Canggu: this is a serious cocktail bar run by the team behind Jakarta's Koda, and it shows. The room leans into caramel and chocolate tones with soft lighting and nothing decorative that isn't also doing a job. Pandan, lemongrass, and black tea turn up in the drinks with quiet intention, and the team will build something bespoke if you'd rather not choose.