The Best Places to Drink and Do in the United States

Cocktail menus organized light to full-bodied are a small kindness this bar extends before you've even ordered. Highball is a dimly lit cocktail bar on the second floor of a historic building in downtown Phoenix, doing the speakeasy thing with genuine commitment. Housemade ingredients show up throughout a lengthy menu where the flavor combinations tend toward the unexpected. A James Beard Outstanding Bar semifinalist, and a first-date spot that actually earns the designation.

Absinthe fountains line the curved bar at this jewel-box cocktail bar steps from St. Louis Cathedral in the Lower Pontalba Building. Oysters and caviar share menu space with a martini that landed on Esquire's national list, and a vintage chandelier keeps the whole room at a glow. It opens at eleven in the morning and closes at ten, the upstairs neighbors having apparently drawn a firm line.

Herbs & Rye is an off-Strip cocktail bar dressed as a steakhouse, all brick walls and red velvet wallpaper, with bartenders in black tie who seem unaware the buffet era ended. The menu is sorted by period, so a pisco sour comes from the Golden Age and a martinez from the Gothic one. It keeps pouring until 3am, which helps, since dinner reservations book up weeks out.

A cocktail bar tucked above a Local Foods in Rice Village, Lee's has a retro speakeasy feel and a menu serious enough to back up the vibe. The drinks lean bitter, briny, and bracingly complex, and a separate mini-cocktail list exists for when you just want a taste. A James Beard semifinalist for Best New Bar and on Bon Appétit's best new bars list, it draws the kind of crowd that actually reads the menu before ordering.

Vaughan's is a Bywater dive where the Mardi Gras tinsel never comes down and Thursday nights mean a brass band that doesn't start until 10:30. The red beans and rice are free, which makes it easier to stay on the dance floor with whichever neighborhood regular grabs your hand first. The owners live nearby and have run the place for decades, so the community events and Pride tea dances feel more like hosting than programming.

Highballs and boilermakers anchor the menu at this jovial Japanese cocktail bar tucked into a Greenwich Village basement, where the drinks list stays refreshingly short and Japanese spirits do most of the talking. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list, which feels about right for a room that punches well above its unpretentious footprint. Go for the sake selection if you're curious; stay for the cocktails once you are.

Multicolored lights, mismatched vintage stools, and enough rum cocktails to stock a small ship set the mood at this funky cocktail bar and dining den inside Krog Street Market. The food leans creative but unfussy, with global touches and most plates meant for sharing. It holds a spot on North America's 50 Best Bars and was a James Beard Outstanding Hospitality nominee, which tracks: the room has that rare quality of feeling genuinely cared for without trying to make you notice.

Brass sconces, emerald armchairs, and a terrazzo counter that looks like a terrazzo counter should look if terrazzo counters had ambition. Identidad is a cocktail bar built around Puerto Rican ingredients sourced from island producers, and the menu rotates often enough that regulars have no excuse to order the same thing twice. It took a 2025 James Beard Award for Best New Bar, which tells you more than the decor already does.

Standby is a cocktail bar you reach by ducking down the Belt Alley and heaving open a pair of ponderous doors, which makes ordering a martini feel like a minor heist. The menu sorts drinks by mood, from "Purist" to "Certified Bangers," so nobody has to explain themselves to a bartender. Matty Matheson of The Bear built the food menu. It's dim, polished, and worth a Resy booking.

Marble bar, leather chairs, thick linens, and windows looking straight down Fifth Avenue: Ai Fiori is a formal Italian restaurant on the second floor of the Langham Hotel that telegraphs expense account before you've ordered drinks. The kitchen leans Italian with enough invention to keep it interesting, and the room is polished enough that nobody's rushing you. Gracious service throughout lunch and dinner.

The long wooden bar came out of a Pennsylvania mining-town dance hall and has been anchoring this Smith Street cocktail bar ever since. Victorian paneling, a tin ceiling, and a curtained parlor with a fireplace in the back make the whole room feel like someone's very well-stocked study. The cocktails are precise and the eponymous Clover Club is on the menu, naturally. The kind of place that makes Brooklyn feel older than it is.

Polished marble, low lighting, and plush fabrics signal exactly the kind of cocktail bar that doesn't care about honky-tonk clichés. Four Walls sits inside The Joseph Nashville, but it operates on its own logic, one that skews global and sleek while the rest of the city leans into its cowboy boots. Esquire put it on their Best Bars in America list, and Food & Wine ranked it among the top hotel bars in the country.

The newspaper-themed menu doubles as a history lesson on the Sunset Strip, which fits, given the leather booths and vintage vinyl setup of this dimly lit neighborhood cocktail bar. Signature drinks are named for local landmarks, the Viper Room, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the like, and priced like someone actually wants you to have a second one. Named to Wildsam's 50 Most Essential Bars in America, it trades the Strip's usual gloss for something considerably more worn-in.

A spa on the 25th floor of the Crown Building, where the city noise that's been eating at you all week simply ceases to exist. The Aman New York Spa trades in total immersion: hammered metals, warm stone, and the kind of hushed calm that feels less designed than inevitable. One of Vogue's 100 Best Spas in the World, it draws the quietly wealthy crowd that considers a pool and steam ritual a reasonable Tuesday.

A spa on the ninth floor of 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, with the kind of views over the Na Pali coastline that make it hard to close your eyes during a treatment. Bamford, a Cotswolds-born wellness brand, landed on Vogue's 100 Best Spas in the World list, and the program leans into Kauai's outdoor culture rather than pretending you came here to stay inside. Useful when the hiking and beaching have finally caught up with you.

Bardessono's spa built its reputation on a simple but unusual idea: the treatment comes to your room. Each suite has a massage table tucked discreetly away, and the lighting, temperature, and sound are all adjustable before the therapist arrives. Products are sourced from the property's certified-organic garden. Vogue named it among the 100 Best Spas in the World, and the unhurried post-treatment wind-down is treated with the same seriousness as the treatment itself.

A château-style health spa and retreat less than an hour from San Diego, built with actual French structures shipped over stone by stone, including a centuries-old chapel. The 32 private villas and manicured grounds lean hard into the Provençal fantasy, while the programming runs from interval training to trapeze yoga. Notably, they feed you real bread and real coffee. Vogue named it one of the 100 Best Spas in the World, and Oprah's a regular.

Set on 150 acres at the foot of the Santa Catalinas, Canyon Ranch is the wellness resort that most other wellness resorts quietly studied. The crowd here skews toward repeat visitors who come to actually disconnect rather than document it, which keeps the energy refreshingly free of performance. Vogue named it among the 100 Best Spas in the World. Five mountain ranges frame the sky, and the architecture is designed around all that contemplative staring into the middle distance.

A spa that sits above the Dior boutique on 57th Street, which tells you everything about the aesthetic before you've booked a treatment. A handful of rooms, every surface predictably plush, and a vibe calibrated less toward transcendence than toward walking out looking like you have somewhere important to be. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world, which the clientele already assumed.

The Self-Centered Garden, a canopied outdoor oasis of draped cabanas, sets the tone for this full-service resort spa perched at the edge of the Atlantic in a blink-and-miss-it township between Palm Beach and Boca. Sauna, steam, jacuzzi with a waterfall shower, bottomless bubbles before and after your treatment, plus a terrace cafe for fresh-pressed juices when you're ready to pretend you're healthy. Vogue named it among its 100 Best Spas in the World.

Hanging off a cliff above the Pacific, Esalen has been an incubator for seekers, skeptics, and the occasional celebrity since forever. It's a holistic retreat and workshop center, not a spa, though the cliffside hot baths alone justify the drive up Highway 1. You come for a weekend or week-long program, yoga to Gestalt therapy to breathwork, and leave either transformed or at least well-soaked.

Twenty-five miles of private hiking trails wind through the property before you've even booked a massage, which tells you something about the scale of this all-inclusive wellness retreat outside San Diego. The Golden Door has been doing the spa week thing since before it was a thing, and it carries that history lightly: think summer camp for people whose summers cost considerably more. Vogue named it among the 100 Best Spas in the World.

The Guerlain spa occupies the fifth floor of the newly reopened Waldorf Astoria, a quietly secluded floor above one of the more theatrically gorgeous hotel lobbies in the city. Treatments come with optional makeup touch-ups, a detail that makes more sense once you've seen the Art Deco grandeur waiting downstairs. Vogue named it among its 100 Best Spas in the World, and the hotel's pull is clearly part of the pitch.

A 12,000-square-foot wellness circuit at Stanly Ranch in Napa, Halehouse Spa is designed for people who bring the same intensity to recovery that they bring to everything else. The setup runs in three parts: a movement studio, a recovery space using heat, cold, and steam, and the spa itself. Vogue named it among its 100 Best Spas in the World, which tracks given that the surrounding valley treats well-being less like a weekend treat and more like a performance metric.

The spa at Grand Wailea takes its name from ancient Hawaiian stargazers, and the reference is not decorative. Kilolani's treatment menu shifts every ten days to follow the lunar cycle, folding in native botanicals and indigenous healing practices that change with the moon's path. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world. At 50,000 square feet, it's a serious commitment, which suits Wailea's crowd perfectly.

The spa at Kona Village looks away from the bay and toward the lava fields instead, which tells you something about its personality. Named Asaya under Rosewood's recent revival of the resort, it sits where black volcanic rock meets jungle softness, a contrast that's hard to manufacture and impossible to ignore. Vogue named it one of the 100 Best Spas in the World, and the setting does a lot of the convincing before anyone even lights a candle.

A 20,000-square-foot wellness center at a rambling New England inn two hours from New York, Mayflower Spa sits on 58 wooded acres at the Berkshires' foothills and has landed on Vogue's 100 Best Spas in the World list. The spa mixes Eastern and Western treatments, so alongside the standard facials and bodywork you'll find reiki, acupuncture, and Tarot readings, which is either refreshing or alarming depending on how you feel about your future.

The spa Oprah sold to daytime America is now available to East Coasters without flying to Arizona. The Life in Balance Spa at Miraval Berkshires goes well beyond hot stones and cucumber water, offering treatments so elaborate they're called rituals, including a guided stretch-massage where the therapist hangs from silk ceiling drapes and uses her feet on your shoulders. Vogue named it among the 100 Best Spas in the World, and the forested Lenox setting gives the whole thing a very convincing "I've done the work" atmosphere.

The spa at Blackberry Mountain sits at 2,800 feet in the Great Smoky Mountains, which Vogue named one of the 100 best spas in the world, and the elevation does half the work before you even walk in. The 5,200-acre property is deliberately underdeveloped, so treatments unfold against a backdrop of rolling clouds and ridge lines. Come expecting a full mountain-resort spa, not a quick in-and-out.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame lodgepole pines and snow-capped peaks from inside the treatment rooms, which means the Montana wilderness does half the therapeutic work before anyone touches you. This standalone spa covers 17,000 square feet within One&Only Moonlight Basin's vast stretch of protected Rocky Mountain land, and the programming leans into that setting rather than pretending you're somewhere tropical. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world.

The bouncer-doorman at the entrance of a spa is either performance art or proof that downtown Flatiron runs by its own logic. Rescue Spa is a boutique day spa with a small retail edit, a following among beauty editors who treat their facials like a standing appointment, and a reputation for scented washcloths that provoke an almost suspicious consensus. Vogue named it among the 100 Best Spas in the World.

The steam room runs so thick with vapor it reads as sensory deprivation, and the experiential shower has a tropical-storm setting that does exactly what you'd expect. This full-service spa at the Salamander resort in Virginia horse country covers the full range, from salon blowouts to soaking tubs to a private outdoor pool, with tepidarium chairs for the aftermath. Vogue named it one of the 100 Best Spas in the World, which the riding-boot crowd already knew.

Larry Ellison's Palm Springs compound is the backdrop, but the spa at Sensei Porcupine Creek runs on a different philosophy than most desert retreats. The pitch is data-driven wellness, with guides who are actual behavior-change scientists rather than people in linen who hand you cucumber water. You can go deep on biometrics, or fill the day with treatments and pool time and call it research. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world.

A bamboo crosshatch ceiling, dismantled in Japan and reassembled beam by beam in a Tribeca basement, sets the tone at Shibui. This spa inside the Greenwich Hotel is modeled on the Japanese onsen tradition: a heated indoor pool, hushed treatment rooms, and towels soaked in warm sake. The whole thing whispers while other spas shout. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world, which tracks when you're wrapped in sake-damp linen under ancient timber.

The spa inside the Parker Palm Springs calls itself the Palm Springs Yacht Club, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds for a property landlocked in the desert. Jonathan Adler designed it, so expect nautical whimsy alongside the saltwater pool, eucalyptus steam rooms, and saunas. Treatments are personalized and nearly all end with a scalp massage. Vogue named it one of the 100 best spas in the world.

A wellness retreat in the Hudson Highlands built around the idea that you should earn your massage, The Ranch Hudson Valley runs three- and four-day programs of hard hiking, stripped-down eating, and daily bodywork, colon hydrotherapy included if you're feeling ambitious. Guests arrive having already done 30 days of homework. Named to Vogue's 100 Best Spas in the World, it draws the kind of New Yorkers who treat relaxation like a project with deliverables.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Catskills and Shawangunks from inside a hammam-style bathhouse that somehow manages to feel warm despite being genuinely stark. This spa at the Inness resort runs about 7,000 square feet, with a saltwater pool for warmer months and the kind of severe, expensive minimalism that ends up being more inviting than intimidating. Vogue put it on their 100 Best Spas in the World list, which tracks.

The art on the walls here runs to Alex Katz, Chuck Close, and Hockney, which sets an odd, pleasant tone for a spa. The building itself is almost cathedral-proportioned, with soaring ceilings and windows that look out over Cayuga Lake and the lavender fields surrounding it. Treatments lean Ayurvedic, and the hot and cold soaking pools, saunas, and steam rooms fill out the rest of the afternoon. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world.

Sheep actually graze the grounds here, which sets the tone before you've unpacked. The Wellhouse is the multi-floor spa at Blackberry Farm, a sprawling Tennessee mountain property where guests tend to arrive and simply not leave. Hiking, fly-fishing, kayaking, yoga on a tree-line deck, and farm animals to pet fill the hours around treatments. Vogue named it among the 100 best spas in the world, which tracks when the backdrop is 4,200 Smoky Mountain acres.

The cabin is dressed in burnt orange and warm walnut, the windows show a looping blue-yonder reel, and a flight attendant is rolling the beverage cart your way. Carry On is an immersive cocktail lounge built around the first-class, Mad Men-era flight fantasy, preflight announcements and all. Reservations drop weekly and go fast, so plan accordingly. The Spirited Awards named it a Top 10 U.S. Nominee for Best New Cocktail Bar.

A four-tap absinthe drip at the center of the bar is a replica of the one at the Absinthe House in New Orleans, and that tells you most of what you need to know. Maison Premiere is a cocktail and oyster bar in Williamsburg that commits fully to the bit: dim golden light, mock antique everything, marble bar top, the faint sense that you've wandered into another city and century. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list, which tracks.

A cocktail bar on Portland's tourist-heavy Wharf Street that opened with a stated mission to make the block worth visiting. The drinks lean on reworked classics, with hot dogs and bar snacks to keep things honest. The $28 Flaming Scorpion Bowl arrives in a blaze of mild chaos, which tells you the room doesn't take itself too seriously. Punch named it one of the best new bars in the country, and Esquire flagged its espresso martini among the best in America.

NightBloom is a late-night cocktail bar on St. Claude, run by the Bacchanal team, and the lighting is a coral glow flattering enough that you may forget you came to drink. The menu runs from an olive salad martini to a smoky pineapple margarita, and the bartenders will talk playlists with you. Some nights there are dance parties or custom nail art, and a dog may adopt your table. Eater named it Best New Bar.

The digital windows scroll through passing landscapes while you sit inside a wood-paneled Presidential Pullman car that never moves, which is either the concept or the joke, possibly both. Platform 18 is a reservation-only immersive cocktail bar built around Prohibition-era drinks and Roaring Twenties New York. The Pinnacle Guide awarded it 2 Pins. Book ahead; walk-ins go nowhere fast.

There's no menu at Bryant's, just a bartender who asks what you're in the mood for and then makes something better than you imagined. This Milwaukee cocktail lounge has been around forever, all dark wood, velvet booths, and Rat Pack lighting that flatters everyone equally. A 2025 James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Bar, though the room feels too cool to acknowledge it. Come dressed like you mean it.

Nickel City is an East Austin neighborhood bar that has been pouring drinks on this corner since the 1930s and sees no reason to get fancy about it. The focus is cold beer, boilermakers, and draft Pimm's, with the occasional Aperol Spritz for anyone feeling continental. A food truck out back sells Detroit-style Coney dogs and wings, which is how a quick drink turns into a full afternoon.

Housed in a renovated rail depot, Kimball House is a seafood restaurant and serious cocktail bar with tufted leather booths, a carved mahogany bar, and a raw bar menu running past twenty oyster varieties, complete with tasting notes so you don't have to guess. Esquire named the Kimball House martini among America's finest, which should tell you something. The kitchen runs seasonal, and dessert regularly steals the table's attention. A Michelin Selected restaurant.

The big neon sign out front survived the gap years when nothing else did, and it still draws you in off Atlantic Avenue. This Art Deco bar in Cobble Hill has been around forever, and Toby Cecchini, the bartender who invented the Cosmopolitan, brought it back to life with the booths and floral wallpaper more or less intact. The kitchen does a Reuben and a double-patty burger, but the cocktails are what fill the room on a Tuesday.

The wine list has a dedicated section for aged Madeira, which tells you something about the seriousness of the operation. This moody Poncey-Highland wine bar holds a Michelin selection and landed on Bon Appétit's best new bars list, but the kitchen pulls its own weight with snacks, shareable plates, and evening mains that feel seasonal without being precious. A James Beard semifinalist for Best New Bar, it draws the kind of crowd that actually reads the back label.

A former auto garage with a butcher-paper cocktail menu still hanging above the makeshift kitchen, Liquid Diet is a creative cocktail bar where the bartenders juice and blend everyday ingredients into drinks that read like a dare. Bell pepper martinis, key lime sippers, banana bread cocktails with cookie shards frozen into chiseled ice cubes. Esquire named it one of the best bars in America, and curious tourists and pub crawlers seem to be putting that to the test nightly.

The eponymous julep anchors the menu, but this Washington Ave cocktail bar stretches well past that single calling card into a sprawling collection of bourbon and a drink list built around herbs and Southern ingredients most bars don't bother sourcing. The vibe is old-school Southern hospitality without the kitsch, and the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program in 2022 suggests the approach landed.

The whole room is built to look like the cargo hold of a 19th-century ship, portholes and all, which sets the stakes early at this immersive tiki bar on Indian School. The cocktail menu runs from classics to the team's own riffs on the genre, leaning into the full theatrical bit without apologizing for it. Phoenix New Times named it the city's top tiki bar, and the Spirited Awards put the bar team among the top four in the U.S.

A fortune-teller in the window is not a gimmick so much as a promise about the evening ahead. Past the red velvet curtains, this art deco cocktail bar on Hudson Street runs to carved wood, marble floors, a tin ceiling, and an onyx fireplace, all of it suggesting you should order something serious and stay a while. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list, which the regulars probably already knew.

A cocktail bar in the Financial District built around the legend of John Morrissey, a bare-knuckle Irish immigrant who ran one of the city's rougher gangs in the 1800s. The menu reads like a graphic novel, each volume dropping the Rabbit into a new era of New York's murkier chapters. The drinks are theatrical without being silly, and the Irish pub downstairs keeps things grounded for anyone who just wants a pint.

Tiger Bar is a gin-leaning cocktail bar on Gallatin Pike dressed as a 1930s carnival sideshow, and it commits without tipping into costume party. There's a mystery cocktail wheel you can spin to let fate pick your drink, which saves you from the menu and also from yourself. The Flamin' Hot Mozz Sticks have a Nashville Scene award, and Esquire put the place on its list of America's bars.

The house martini splits its base between vodka and gin, throws in fino sherry and a river rock tincture, and arrives garnished with olives, a twist, and pearl onions, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Belltown cocktail lounge. Rob Roy calls itself a classic bar "with a bit of punk cheek," and the drinks make the case quietly. A James Beard nominee for Outstanding Bar, it has been a neighborhood anchor long enough to feel lived-in without feeling tired.

A full page of negronis is either a menu or a dare, and Dante in Greenwich Village has been inviting people to find out for longer than anyone cares to count. This Italian cocktail cafe and all-day aperitivo spot leans into its old-school bones without getting musty about it, pairing the drinks with burrata and charcuterie. Named a James Beard Outstanding Bar semifinalist and ranked on North America's 50 Best Bars list.

Pink and purple neon sets the mood at this intimate cocktail bar, which leans hard into '80s New York nostalgia. Your drink arrives in whatever ceramic vessel the bartender feels like, a bunny, a donut with a handle, something stranger. The menu spans highballs, zero-proof options, and signatures like a blue cheese martini, but the real move is handing the bartender your preferences and letting them pull from a catalog of a thousand recipes.

The Patterson House is a cocktail bar that moved up to the top of a Gulch building and traded its old library-and-cigars gloom for a sweeping room hung with deep purple curtains. After dark they pull the drapes back to show the city lights, which suits a Manhattan fine. The food menu is big enough now that the pork chop might be your whole date night, not a warm-up for dinner.

The name comes from an era when locals climbed to the roof to watch atomic test blasts light up the Nevada sky. This old-school bar on Fremont Street has been around forever, and the Rat Pack drank here after their shows, which sets the tone pretty neatly. The red-tinted interior leans into Atomic Age kitsch, sour beers are a specialty, and the patio out back is where late nights tend to end up.

You enter through the back of a neighboring cafe, down a hallway, through a wooden door, and suddenly you're somewhere else entirely. This moody Oak Cliff speakeasy-style cantina stocks only bottles sourced from Mexico, and the cocktail menu is organized by historical era, walking you through the evolution of Mexican drinking culture. A James Beard Outstanding Bar semifinalist, it also does pre-Hispanic Oaxacan small plates for when the mezcal needs company.

A converted cottage on McDowell Road that smells faintly of old rugs and good intentions, Sauvage is a natural wine bar and bottle shop where the list leans toward obscure regions and the staff will talk you through all of it. Charcuterie and tinned fish are always on hand, and local chefs occasionally pop up to cook. Esquire named it one of the best bars in America, which the room, unhurried and candlelit, seems entirely unbothered by.

The mirrored back bar, lit from behind like a stage set, makes the priorities clear before you even sit down. Midnight Rambler is a subterranean cocktail lounge under the Joule Hotel, all art deco bones and low light, with a soundtrack chosen as carefully as the drinks. The cocktail program leans neo-classic, and the bartenders are the kind who can track down whatever obscure thing you're about to describe to them.

The annual menu at this downtown Phoenix cocktail bar arrives as a lavishly illustrated tome, and the bar takes its ice quality as seriously as its recipes. Ross Simon's self-stated motto is "whimsical as fuck," which coexists happily alongside one of the coldest martinis in the city, served in red-leather booths under tall ceilings. A Spirited Awards Regional Top 10 Honoree, it draws a queue worth joining online before you arrive.

A hundred classics and eight seasonal originals on the cocktail menu, which is either a philosophy or a dare. This is the Houston cocktail bar that regulars will tell you changed the city's drinking culture, and they are not wrong to say it. The brass-accented room runs loud and energetic, the staff can talk you through any corner of that list, and the salty snacks exist to keep you at the bar longer.

Dark wood, sink-in seating in bold colors, and cocktail names that tip you off early: this is a cocktail bar that wants you to stay longer than you planned. The menu leans playful and genuinely inventive, and the room has enough tucked corners for a long conversation. A James Beard Best New Bar semifinalist and an Esquire Best Bars pick, it earns both without trying too hard about either.

The martini here gets shaken with both vodka and gin, which is either a provocation or a correction depending on your religion. Death & Co is a cocktail bar that started in New York and landed in RiNo, bringing the same intricate, unhurried approach to drinking. The room is loungey and deliberate, the kind of place where settling in for three rounds feels like the obvious move rather than a guilty one.