The 100 Best Places to Drink and Stay in the United States

Julia Momosé's Japanese-inspired dining bar on West Lake holds a James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar and the Spirited Awards title for World's Best Bar, which tells you something before you've even sat down. Staff in sharp black uniforms somehow manage to feel genuinely warm rather than stiff, and the tasting menu now matches the cocktail program's precision, leaning into Japanese flavors and technique. Come for the drinks, stay through dinner, and plan to linger longer than you intended.

Crimson walls, floor cushions, and sculptures that look borrowed from a warehouse no one was using anyway: Schmuck is a cocktail bar on 1st Avenue that landed at number four on North America's 50 Best Bars in its first year open. The Barcelona sibling to Two Schmucks, it splits into a lounge side and a communal kitchen table side, so you can either settle in or make friends faster than planned.

The dining room is styled after a yacht interior, which could read as a gimmick but lands as a mood. Providence is a three-Michelin-star seafood tasting menu restaurant on Melrose, where Michael Cimarusti builds multi-course meals around wild-caught American fish and whatever the farmers market offers that morning. The James Beard Award for Outstanding Hospitality is on the wall, and the front-of-house earns it. North America's 50 Best lists it at number 32.

Sip & Guzzle is a two-floor cocktail bar in the West Village, and it's the rare place with two personalities that get along. Upstairs is a brick-and-wood saloon with highballs, Japanese beer, and a Negroni dressed like Miami Vice. Downstairs, a tiny rice-paper room plays the Edo era, with slower drinks and a wagyu sandwich served in a gold box. It was named The 50 Best Bars in North America's number one for 2026.

A brandy crusta in a 19th-century Creole cottage on the edge of the French Quarter sets the tone for this cocktail bar, which took home the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar in 2024. The room is unhurried and genuinely romantic, the kind of place that makes ordering a second drink feel like the responsible choice. The drinks lean into New Orleans' deep cocktail history without feeling like a museum.

Jon Yao's tasting menu restaurant lives in the Row DTLA, where polished concrete and an open kitchen set a spare stage for cooking rooted in Taiwanese heritage and San Gabriel Valley muscle memory. The ten courses are not shy about seasoning, and the drinks program, a James Beard winner in its own right, pulls equal weight. Kato holds a Michelin star and a spot on North America's 50 Best, and Yao won the James Beard for Best Chef: California.

The building was once a carriage house, then a sculptor's studio, and now a three-level Japanese cocktail bar in Gramercy where the drinks are as considered as the history. The team behind it spent years at Angel's Share before going solo here, and it shows in every measured pour. Nikka whisky and yuzu turn up alongside immaculate riffs on classics. Named among North America's 50 Best Bars, and the room earns the quiet confidence.

Bar Snack is a Lower East Side cocktail bar named after the snaquiri, a miniature daiquiri that bartenders order by the round and call it a toast. The room runs on wood paneling, neon, and orange vinyl stools, with paper menus and frozens that rotate. It ranks third on North America's 50 Best Bars, and the Spice Bag, fries and chicken tenders in a brown paper sack, makes dressing down feel like the plan.

Every suite has a working fireplace, which feels like a minor miracle in Midtown Manhattan. Aman New York is a hotel occupying the upper floors of the old Crown Building on Fifth Avenue, with 83 residential-style suites, a three-floor wellness complex mixing cryotherapy with Traditional Chinese Medicine, an omakase restaurant, and a speakeasy-style jazz club below. It holds three Michelin Keys and a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

The fried chicken sandwich at a cocktail bar is either a cry for help or a statement of intent, and at Service Bar it's the latter. This relaxed U Street neighborhood bar keeps the classics balanced and the housemade drinks genuinely inventive, pulling from ingredients most menus wouldn't dare touch. The Spirited Awards named it U.S. Bartender of the Year in 2025, and North America's 50 Best Bars has it at number 39.

Scotch Lodge is a dark, wood-paneled whisky bar with towering walls of bottles, marble counters, and the kind of lighting that forgives everything. It won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar. Drinks come smoky and layered, the kitchen turns out silky pasta and fried brie sticks, and someone in the corner is usually having a quiet moment with a rare pour. Dress like you've read a book, then decline to mention it.

The cocktail menu at this Mission bar changes twice a year, each edition built around a new theme, the kind of concept that sounds like a gimmick until you're on your second drink and deeply invested in 1960s counterculture. Trick Dog won the Spirited Award for Best U.S. Cocktail Bar in 2025, and the room fills with people who know exactly which round they're on. Loaded fries upstairs hold everything together.

A cocktail bar that calls itself a nerdy cocktail bar, a natural wine bar, and your favorite dive bar, and then has the audacity to be all three. The Old Bay Martini landed it on Esquire's radar and the Spirited Awards named it the top U.S. cocktail bar, but the room itself is the tell: hot dogs share menu space with wine you've never heard of, and nobody in here seems to think that's unusual.

Perched above Eleven Madison Park and co-conceived by Daniel Humm and painter Francesco Clemente, this cocktail lounge wears its inspirations visibly, with Clemente's murals covering the walls in the spirit of Zurich's Kronenhalle Bar. Every cocktail on the menu is vegan and built with serious technical ambition, fermented ingredients and infused oils included. It landed at number fifteen on North America's 50 Best Bars in 2026.

A converted firehouse on Freret Street, bare concrete underfoot and a long bar anchoring the room, Cure is a cocktail bar that made Uptown worth the cab ride from the Quarter. The bottle-green banquettes fill with locals who already know what they're ordering. Food & Wine ranked it the top bar in the country, and North America's 50 Best Bars puts it at number 21. The drinks are the argument; the room just makes it easier to stay.

The Beaux-Arts bones alone do a lot of the work here: Corinthian columns, marble staircases, chandeliers the size of small planets, and ceilings high enough to humble anyone who walks in overdressed. The Peninsula New York is a classic Fifth Avenue luxury hotel, the kind where the staff seems to know what you need before you do. It holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, which tracks for a place this committed to doing the traditional thing without irony.

A 24-hour light installation made from 2,000 LED-embedded Harcourt glasses greets you in the foyer, and that's just the warm-up. This Midtown luxury hotel, the crystal brand's first, sits across from MoMA and commits fully to the bit: silver-leaf paneling, pleated-silk walls, fresh roses in orb arrangements, and enough Baccarat crystal to humble a museum gift shop. Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key. Resign yourself to being out-dressed by the lobby.

The rooms start around the 35th floor, so Central Park and the Hudson are laid out below you like a diorama, and that view does a lot of the talking for a luxury hotel that also works hard to earn it. Wood paneling, marble, framed kimonos, and gold throw pillows signal the Mandarin group's Far Eastern aesthetic, carried off without feeling like a theme park. It holds a Forbes Five Star, and the spa alone draws guests who aren't even sleeping here.

Every American president since Truman has kept a suite here, which tells you roughly what kind of hotel The Carlyle is. It sits on the Upper East Side, one block from Central Park, and runs on old-world Manhattan formality so thick you feel underdressed just reading about it. Novelty, as the thinking goes, is for downtown. The Carlyle holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels and two Michelin Keys, and neither comes as a surprise.

Butlers in white gloves and black tails unpack your bags and pour your morning coffee at this landmark Midtown hotel, a Forbes Five Star that has occupied Fifth Avenue's corner since before anyone you know was born. The marble staircases and original brass detailing survived a recent renovation intact, so the grand-hotel theatrics feel less like nostalgia and more like the building simply refusing to modernize its personality.

The custom-designed everything, down to the furniture, signals that True Laurel takes itself seriously, which would be more insufferable if the drinks weren't so good. This cocktail bar and restaurant from the Lazy Bear team lands at number 14 on North America's 50 Best Bars list. Small plates rotate with the seasons, and the bar program is tight, inventive, and the clear reason most people show up.

A cocktail bar in Los Feliz that treats the agave category as a field guide rather than a menu category. While most bars stop at tequila and mezcal, Mírate goes deep into hyper-regional Mexican distillates, fermented pulque, tejuino, and tepache, much of it personally scouted by the beverage director. It landed at number 28 on North America's 50 Best Bars. The classics framework keeps things approachable; the spirits list is where things get interesting.

Perched at the corner of Central Park South and Sixth Avenue, this 33-story Ritz-Carlton holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, and earns both by feeling considerably smaller and quieter than it has any right to be. The rooms lean into a neutral palette with dark wood molding and plush club chairs, the kind of old-New York-club aesthetic that stops just short of stuffy. Central Park is right there, and somehow the street noise isn't.

A neon-pink exclamation mark glows above the door of this Michelin-starred contemporary Italian restaurant, wedged between a laundromat and a medical center in Buena Vista. The room is small and forest-green, and the staff seem to be enjoying themselves as much as anyone eating there. The menu calls itself Italian, then wanders somewhere more interesting, with house-made pastas and combinations that raise an eyebrow before they make total sense.

The Mark is a hotel on Madison Avenue where Jacques Grange's monochromatic striped marble and spearmint lacquered bathrooms do most of the talking before you've even unpacked. The Upper East Side address puts the Met two blocks away, though Jean-Georges Vongerichten's kitchen and a New York outpost of Caviar Kaspia make leaving feel like an unreasonable ask. Met Gala week, the lobby fills with people whose outfits are the reason museums exist. Michelin 2 Keys and a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

A metal beaded curtain on the fourth floor of a downtown Marriott is not where you expect to find one of the country's better cocktail bars, and yet here we are. The menu arrives illustrated like a small field guide, one drawing per drink. The cocktails run from riffed classics to things you won't find elsewhere, with bar snacks serious enough to anchor a full evening. It won the Spirited Award for Best U.S. Hotel Bar in 2025, and a James Beard semifinalist nod followed.

The cobblestone block it sits on feels more like a Soho mews than Soho, which is rather the point. This boutique hotel from the London-rooted Firmdale group layers bold English country house fabric and color against warehouse-style windows, so every room reads like a very confident decorator's private flat. A sculpture garden, a drawing room with an honor bar, and a Sunday Film Club keep the mood firmly residential. It holds a Michelin 3 Keys and a Forbes Four Star.

No two rooms share the same design at this 88-room Tribeca luxury hotel, where hand-laid Moroccan tiles might give way to Japanese lacquerware or Italian linens depending on which door you open. Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt pulled it together into something that reads less like a hotel than a well-traveled collector's apartment. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels and a Michelin Key, and sits a block from the Hudson with good restaurants right outside.

Pacific-leaning flavors, from calamansi and shiso to li-hing mui, anchor the cocktail menu at this Union Square-adjacent bar that rebuilt itself after a fire and came back more focused. The drinks draw on Asian and island influences without feeling like a theme park about it. A 2026 James Beard Award winner for Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service, and ranked on North America's 50 Best Bars list, PCH draws a crowd that takes its glass seriously but doesn't dress like it.

Dark green walls, framed art, and a room that somehow feels like midnight at noon, ViceVersa is a Neapolitan pizza and cocktail bar tucked just off the lobby of the Elser Hotel. The thin-crust pies are the anchor, but the bar program is the real argument for staying. The affogato martini landed on Esquire's radar, and the place sits on North America's 50 Best Bars list. A James Beard nominee for Best New Bar in 2025, too.

Two large trees grow inside the restaurant, peacock sconces line the walls, and a black lacquered cabinet of curiosities anchors the lobby, so you get the idea immediately. This hotel near the Flatiron pairs a historic mansion with a 24-story tower, both dressed in Martin Brudnizki's maximalist interiors. The World's 50 Best Hotels list ranks it, and Michelin awarded it 2 Keys. Bring a high tolerance for splendor.

A bedside panel controls the temperature, lighting, curtains, and music without your ever leaving the 300-thread-count sheets, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Forbes Five Star hotel on the Mag Mile. Rooms run to light wood and muted earth tones, marble bathrooms have soaking tubs with their own TVs, and a skyline-level spa gives you a reason to eventually get up. Discretion is the whole point, and the staff has clearly rehearsed.

Velvet booths, globe lights, and wallpaper that belongs in a Left Bank salon set the mood at this Fulton Market cocktail bar, one of the few standalone drinking spots on a street that is otherwise all restaurants. The Paris-in-the-sixties premise runs through everything: French wines, classic martinis, caviar with chips. Named to North America's 50 Best Bars and a James Beard semifinalist, Bisous earns its kisses.

The pale-pink landmark on Sunset Boulevard has been hiding celebrities in its private bungalows since forever, and that arrangement suits everyone just fine. It's a full-service luxury hotel with tropical gardens, a retro pool that looks like a film still, and guest rooms fitted in English furniture and marble baths. The Polo Lounge still runs on handshakes. Forbes Five Star, a Michelin 3 Keys, and a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

One of NoMad's tallest towers, designed by Rafael Viñoly, gives every room a view that slides from the Empire State Building down to the Statue of Liberty. This Ritz-Carlton plays it contemporary rather than fusty, and the interiors manage to please both the old-guard luxury crowd and guests who know their architects. José Andrés runs the culinary side, with a mezze restaurant and a Spanish-Japanese hybrid on the floors below. A Michelin Key and Forbes Four Star.

Money-green walls and brown leather set the tone at this approachable cocktail bar where Filipinotown, Echo Park, and Downtown all bleed together. The crowd reflects the neighborhood mix, and the bar leans into that, keeping menus short and descriptive so nobody feels lost. Seasonal cocktails share space with a Frozen of the Month, which is exactly the kind of menu that means everyone leaves happy. A James Beard Outstanding Bar semifinalist and on North America's 50 Best Bars list.

Perched in Beverly Hills' Golden Triangle, this Forbes Five Star hotel looks out over Beverly Canon Gardens, where white parasols and a fountain do their best impression of a Roman piazza. Rooms run floor-to-ceiling windows and proper beds. The rooftop holds a pool and a Dante outpost for cocktails above the Hollywood Hills. Somewhere below, a dedicated caviar and oyster bar awaits guests who find the minibar insufficiently ambitious.

The last building Mies van der Rohe ever designed now has a hotel on its lower floors, which is either a poetic ending or a very good address depending on your priorities. The Langham sits beside the Chicago River with travertine bathrooms, serious service, and afternoon tea if you want it. A Forbes Five Star and two Michelin Keys confirm the tier, though the river views from the upper rooms do most of the convincing on their own.

A back-alley cocktail bar from Erik Bruner-Yang and Paola Velez, where the food refuses to stay in its lane. The menu riffs on Taiwan and El Salvador in the same breath, papusas share space with gochujang mayo, and the baked Alaska, a Washingtonian dish of the year, arrives under torched Dominican meringue hiding guava shaved ice and whatever surprises the kitchen buried underneath. Bon Appétit named it one of America's best new bars, and the room earns the fuss.

A lobby fireplace separates the mirrored bar from the seating area, and the whole ground floor reads like a museum annex, which is apt given that SFMOMA is next door and the Museum of the African Diaspora occupies part of the building. This Forbes Five Star hotel keeps rooms large by San Francisco standards, with neutral Yabu Pushelberg interiors and deep soaking tubs. Athletes, touring bands, and anyone else who needs a quiet car on call tend to wash up here.

Polished wood, tattooed bartenders, and leather aprons as far as the eye can see. Bar Leather Apron is a serious cocktail bar tucked into Fort Street Mall, and it won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar in 2023, which is the kind of thing that makes sense once you sit down. The menu leans on local, seasonal ingredients, so the drinks read like a farmers market with a liquor license. Go slow; this isn't a round-of-shots situation.

A black glass tower at Columbus Circle, right where Midtown meets Central Park, and a Forbes Five Star hotel that takes the personal-attaché thing as a given rather than a talking point. The 176 rooms come with floor-to-ceiling windows and a lot of marble, and the park views feel like a private arrangement rather than a lucky coincidence. Gilded bathroom fixtures and Christofle trays set the decorative register pretty clearly.

I.M. Pei's only complete project in the Western hemisphere sits on 57th Street looking nothing like any other Four Seasons on earth, its limestone facade quarried from the same Burgundy source as the Louvre. This is a hotel that does not do understatement: standard rooms run 600 square feet, the lobby ceiling clears 33 feet, and the bathtubs fill in under a minute. Caramel Deco interiors, panoramic Midtown views, and a staff database that remembers your room-service habits from three years ago.

The 24-karat gold-plated faucets in every bathroom are either the most New York thing imaginable or the most New York thing imaginable. This grand luxury hotel sits at the southeast corner of Central Park in French Renaissance splendor, with Beaux-Arts interiors that have hosted everyone from the Beatles to Eloise. The Forbes Four Star Palm Court still serves afternoon tea, and the Champagne Bar exists, which says everything.

A grandfather clock by Maarten Baas sits in the lobby, its face replaced by a video of a man hand-painting the time, continuously. That sets the tone for this 86-room Midtown boutique hotel from London's Firmdale Hotels, where padded fabric wallpaper and original art fill rooms that look nothing like the rest of the neighborhood. A Forbes Four Star and three Michelin Keys for a property that treats Kit Kemp's textile instincts as a design brief.

Rooms on the upper floors look directly over the Public Garden, which is the kind of view that makes you forget what a hotel room costs. This is a classic luxury hotel that holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, and a recent renovation sharpened the interiors without leaning on tired colonial signifiers. The beds are serious, the marble bathrooms feel almost indulgent, and an eighth-floor indoor pool adds a quietly civilized touch.

Georgetown's grand old luxury hotel, the Four Seasons holds a Forbes Five Star and draws the kind of guests who already know what thread count they prefer. The 222 rooms lean traditional in a city that considers tradition a professional requirement, so the aesthetic fits like a well-pressed suit. Bourbon Steak handles dinner, a proper fitness club handles the rest, and the staff handles everything with the unhurried confidence of people who've seen every VIP twice.

Pink roses and ginger flower greet you at the door, a signature touch that signals how seriously The Langham takes the small stuff. This Forbes Four Star hotel sits on Fifth Avenue within easy reach of Midtown's big landmarks, drawing business travelers and visitors alike. "Service stylists" gather your preferences before you even arrive, handling show tickets, dinner reservations, and checkout times, so the city feels a little less like a logistics problem.

A cocktail bar with its own craft distiller's license, which means the team controls everything in the glass from the spirit up. Set in a wildly decorated corner spot in Nob Hill, Happy Accidents runs a sustainability-forward program with a menu spanning tightened-up highballs and martinis to stranger, more playful builds. Food leans New Mexican and Southern. A Spirited Awards Top 4 Finalist and a James Beard semifinalist for cocktail service in 2025.

Ski-in/ski-out at the base of the Silver Queen Gondola, which means you clip in roughly where you check out. The Little Nell is a Forbes Five Star, Michelin Key resort hotel that Aspen's serious regulars treat as the only address in town. Champalimaud's renovation left it looking like a very confident idea of mountain luxury, with fireplaces, deep sofas, and suites whose vaulted ceilings frame the kind of views that make unpacking feel optional.

Boston's second Four Seasons sits in a Henry Cobb skyscraper, which means floor-to-ceiling glass and views that remind you this city is actually quite flat. The hotel is contemporary in a way that still feels safe for anyone who travels with a hanging bag, with a full spa, an indoor pool, and Zuma and LPM for dining. It holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, and the room views alone reframe the city.

The keypad combination lives behind a bookcase at the Four Seasons, and the concierge will share it once you've booked one of the twenty seats. Bandista is a speakeasy cocktail bar whose drinks draw from Prohibition's smuggling routes and the tequileros who ran the Mexican border, which gives the menu a Latin angle that the 1920s decor alone wouldn't suggest. North America's 50 Best Bars placed it at number 47.

Chandelier Bar is the glamorous hotel lobby bar at the foot of Canal Street, all marble, crystal, and gold fittings, with a chandelier big enough to have lent its name and its crystal to the martini glass. Cognac shows up in the cocktails, including a fortified sazerac, and the bartenders are nicer than the surroundings strictly require. The potato chips arrive free, so dinner can technically be skipped.

Wood-burning fireplaces in a Manhattan hotel room are rare enough to feel like a rumor, but many suites here have one. The Lowell is an intimate Upper East Side hotel decorated like an English country house that somehow pulled it off, with floral fabrics, chinoiserie, and individually furnished rooms that never match a chain template. It holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star. The Pembroke Room does afternoon tea; the Post House does steakhouse duty downstairs.

The bronze double doors open onto something that feels more like a quietly loaded private club than a hotel lobby. Occupying the lower floors of the One57 skyscraper on Billionaires' Row, with Carnegie Hall across the street, this luxury hotel dresses its common areas as a "Study" and a "Living Room," which is either charming or a bit on the nose, depending on your mood. A Forbes Four Star property.

Princess Diana in Eagles gear hangs on the wall, a neon sign says "Never Grow Up," and somehow the kitchen is turning out steak au poivre and egg sandwiches that New York Times critics put on their Philadelphia shortlist. This all-day café runs from thick malted pancakes in the morning through hoagies built with fine-dining precision at lunch, into a full dinner menu at night. Whimsy is the decor; the cooking means it.

Twelve acres of canyon gardens in the middle of Los Angeles, with a swan lake at the entrance that no one can resist photographing. This is a hotel that runs on discretion, the opposite of see-and-be-seen, where the saltwater pool still has a genuine deep end and the rooms have outdoor fireplaces. The bar has been a quiet local haunt for years, and The Restaurant has drawn fresh attention since a French Laundry alum took the kitchen. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels.

A red mirrored hallway leads you down into this speakeasy-style cocktail lounge beneath a north Scottsdale restaurant, which is exactly the kind of entrance that makes people feel they've earned their drink. Inside, gold ceilings, red velvet drapes, and live music set a mood that commits fully to the bit. The cocktails lean sweet-and-savory strange, and small bites keep the evening going. Phoenix New Times named it Best Bar in 2025.

Fancy Jell-O shots and distilled emu neck share a menu here, which should tell you something about the ambitions of this underground cocktail bar beneath the Riggs Hotel. Red plush, silver trophies, and low ceilings give it the feel of a gentleman's club that took a very interesting turn. The bar comes from Ryan Chetiyawardana, Mr. Lyan himself, and it landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list.

A mirror-glass tower rising above SoHo's cast-iron rooflines, the Dominick earns its height with Hudson River views that most of the neighborhood can't touch. It's a full-service luxury hotel with Fendi Casa furnishings, a Rockwell Group interior, a rooftop pool lined in Italian blue mosaic, and a spa with separate hammams. The lobby's bronze, leather, and Venetian plaster set a tone that the rooms, with their soaking tubs and Turkish stone walls, are happy to maintain.

Caviar on Bugles with crème fraîche is either the most knowing joke in Seattle or a perfectly sincere snack, and at Roquette it reads as both. This Belltown cocktail bar runs on a French-spirits obsession, armagnac and calvados and absinthe doing most of the heavy lifting while classic shapes get quietly rerouted through Normandy or Cognac. A James Beard Outstanding Bar semifinalist that landed on North America's 50 Best Bars list.

Three pools kept at different temperatures sit between the hotel and the Atlantic, which tells you something about The Setai's approach. This Forbes Five Star resort on Collins Avenue leans into calm when everything around it leans into spectacle: soothing neutrals, a residential hush in the lobby, and suites spread across a 1930s Art Deco building and a newer tower. South Beach outside, spa retreat inside.

A private corridor connects the hotel directly to the Prudential Center, which in a Boston February is less a perk and more a lifeline. The Mandarin Oriental is a luxury hotel in Back Bay, its lobby built around local granite, feng shui principles, and a long gas fireplace that earns its keep most of the year. It holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, and the staff seem to know the difference between attentive and hovering.

The Art Deco facade on East 76th Street hasn't changed, but the inside was gutted and reimagined by Martin Brudnizki, which is why this Upper East Side hotel now reads more Corinthia than classic New York dowager. Casa Tua, the members' club with outposts in Miami and Aspen, runs the dining room, so the crowd skews accordingly. It holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.

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.

Twin curved staircases and chandelier-lit rooms that read more like a private club greet you at this Forbes Five Star hotel in Buckhead. Macassar ebony beds, white marble bathrooms, and Juliette balconies are standard; the Empire Suite runs to 3,000 square feet with its own kitchen and gym. The resident restaurant displays original Picassos. Butler service handles the unpacking, because apparently that's a thing you can outsource.

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.

The original 1930s clubhouse, all Jazz Age plasterwork and old-glamour bones, still stands at the center of this Forbes Five Star, Michelin two-key Four Seasons in Surfside. Beachside cabanas, a lavish spa, and the kind of hush that suggests everyone around you is very deliberately not checking email. Thomas Keller's Surf Club Restaurant is on-site, which means dinner requires zero commute. More hideaway than scene, which is precisely the point.

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.

The stuffed woolly mammoth skeleton under the red tent in the lobby tells you immediately what kind of hotel this is: one where restraint was never on the mood board. Alan Faena's Miami Beach property holds a Forbes Five Star and two Michelin Keys, and earns both by committing fully to its own maximalist vision, Old Hollywood glamour reread through a fever dream. Collins Avenue regulars check in and never quite want to leave.

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.

A Guy Dill bronze anchors a circular marble lobby that feels less like a hotel check-in and more like a museum atrium you can sleep in. This Four Seasons occupies the top floors of a 48-story FiDi tower, which means guest rooms start at the 37th floor and the Golden Gate sits framed in the distance on clear days. The Ferry Building is a short walk; hoodies, perhaps not the move here. The Michelin Guide awarded it 2 Keys.

The New York Public Library sits directly across the street, which sets the tone nicely for a hotel that takes its Midtown address seriously. Rooms run loft-style with modernist touches, the bar downstairs shifts from local-sourced comfort food into a low-lit speakeasy after dark, and Grand Central is a two-block walk. A Forbes Four Star property on Fifth Avenue, it handles the neighborhood's ambitions without making you feel like you wandered into a showroom.

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.