The Best Places to Drink in the United States

Bar Angie is a 16-seat cocktail bar upstairs from Angie's, with its own private entrance, so you can skip the downstairs wait without anyone knowing you're hovering. The room goes full Italian Deco, all violet marble and bronze-tinted mirrors, lit warmly enough to forgive a long day. The seasonal drinks come from a former Anvil bartender, with a mortadella sandwich nearby for ballast. Eater included it among Houston's best new cocktail bars.

Bar Brine is what the vegetarian cafe Sneaky Pickle becomes after dark, a neighborhood cocktail bar in the Bywater that swaps the daytime tofu crowd for people who care about shrubs. The drinks lean on housemade cordials, including a rum, passion fruit, and absinthe punch and a coconut-and-cognac answer to the espresso martini. The kitchen keeps going too, with meat and fish alongside the plant-based menu, so nobody has to eat a cocktail onion for dinner.

The martini here comes with pickled shiitake mushrooms, kombu, and bonito flakes, which tells you most of what you need to know about Bar Chinois. It's a French wine bar by aesthetic and an Asian dim sum spot by appetite, and the kitchen takes both halves seriously. The cocktails are genuinely theatrical, and the dumplings, shrimp toast, and braised pork meatball give you every reason to stay past the second round.

A bright green sign on 20th points you toward a cocktail bar where the drinks are named after the paintings hanging in the hotel around it, so you can order your art by the glass. The room is low-lit and plush, a nod to the Heights' old drinking clubs, and nobody will rush you out of your seat. Bar bites include salt and vinegar chips under smoked trout roe. Eater put it on a list of Houston's best new cocktail bars.

You reach this cocktail lounge by emerald carpet, a private elevator, and a pair of floor-to-ceiling green doors, which is a lot of ceremony for a drink. The menu follows the lunar cycle, from a mint-washed gin on the light side to black sesame rum and ube cold foam on the dark one. Golden Hour means $10 cocktails and oysters on weekdays, and weekends bring DJs. Dress like you were told about the elevator.

Bar Roza is a cocktail bar tucked into the alley beside the Arcade, built around aperitifs and bitters rather than the usual whiskey-and-regrets lineup. The menu sorts drinks into categories, including hot-and-cold pairings and ones that make aperitifs and digestifs share custody. Small plates like mortadella focaccia are on hand for pacing yourself, which the creamsicle-tinged pisco drinks will make you appreciate.

Barebottle is a warehouse-sized brewery in Bernal Heights where you navigate dog toys and stroller wheels just to reach the taps. Arcade games, foosball, and a wall of TVs keep the kids busy while the adults drink, and whatever food truck is parked out front handles dinner. Odds are good you'll run into your third grader's classmate, and their dog.

You pass through a cocktail bar to get to the dining room, which sets the tone. Bastion is a tasting-menu restaurant in Wedgewood-Houston built around contemporary Southern cooking that treats the region's pantry as a creative dare rather than a comfort blanket. The kitchen holds a Michelin star and a James Beard nomination, and earns both by keeping things loose enough that the whole thing still feels like a good night out.

The back bar holds what might be the most bewildering collection of vintage Italian Fernet you'll encounter outside of Milan. Billy Sunday is a polished amaro and cocktail bar in Logan Square, narrow and dark-wooded, with green walls and vintage lamps that suggest a gentlemen's club that loosened up considerably. The bar stools fill early with people who know their bitter spirits, and the classically built cocktails give them good reason to stay.

A neighborhood sports bar in Clarkston where the TVs outnumber the pretensions and the crowd comes to actually watch the game. Wings are the reason most people show up, with Buffalo and sweet-and-spicy doing most of the heavy lifting, but the patty melt and Reuben hold their own. The BPH fries arrive loaded with blue cheese, roasted garlic, and tomatoes, which is either a salad or an occasion, depending on your mood.

Bubble Bath Back Bay is a penthouse cocktail bar atop the Citizen M hotel on Newbury Street, with skyline views most Boston bars can only dream of. It's built for ending a shopping day with visitors in tow, someone cradling a prickly pear mezcal drink while bags pile up at their feet. Order champagne, or let the caviar cart roll up and serve it with potato chips and cannoli. It's The Infatuation's pick for the best bars in Boston.

Bumbo's is a neighborhood bar in Hamtramck where the cocktails are cheap enough that nobody has to feel precious about ordering a second. The menu rotates, but a house sour with your choice of spirit is the sort of thing that keeps showing up. The nonalcoholic shelf is unusually deep, so the designated driver gets more than a sad soda. There's a pool table inside and a covered patio out back for hiding.

By The Wayside is an East End cocktail bar on Navigation Boulevard with a stage inside, a patio outside, and a calendar that includes movie nights, vinyl DJs, and the occasional market. Drinks lean on fresh fruit, so a mezcal-tequila number with strawberry sits comfortably beside a floral vodka one with violet. The kitchen sends out brisket nachos and Korean barbecue wings, which is how you stay for a third round. Eater put it on its fall 2026 list of new cocktail bars.

Cafe Sous Terre is a basement cafe and bar tucked under a brick mansion that now rents rooms to strangers, and it plays the French cafe of a century ago with green subway tile and long banquettes. By day it's laptops, coffee sodas, and quiche. After dark it's martinis, a croque monsieur, and weekly Vinyl Wednesdays. Eater lists it among Detroit's best bars and best coffee shops, so the same table does double duty.

Case Chocolates is a speakeasy hidden behind a bookcase in the back of a tiny East End chocolate shop, which is the kind of sentence that should be illegal in a Wes Anderson film but is merely a Tuesday here. The tasting runs three courses of chocolates filled with spirits like gin and carajillo, and the liquor stays polite about it. It's a date-night bet for people who've already done dinner and a movie.

Chopper is a tiki-ish cocktail bar that swapped the grass skirts for robots, with Star Wars characters turning up in the barware and the drinks billed as "lab tested," as if a bar had a lab. Mai tais and rum runners get their own spin alongside a rotating seasonal menu, and the coffee drinks tend to be the interesting ones. A taco truck usually parks out front, so dinner is basically handled.

A craft brewery on a quiet residential street on the north side of town, City Acre feels less like a taproom and more like you wandered into a very well-stocked backyard. The sour series gets regulars talking, and the PB&J porter answers a question nobody asked but everyone is glad got asked. The patio pull is real, which means arriving early if you want a seat that doesn't feel like a compromise.

Clarkwood is a Montrose cocktail bar that spends its evenings halfway to a nightclub, and the heavily garnished drinks leave the bar by the thousands. Dom bottle service shares the room with singles scouting the next prospect and couples whose public affection is testing the tables. Around 10pm on weekends the staff pulls the barstools to make room for more people, which tells you where the seating plan ranks.

Cøllect is a small beer bar on Detroit's east side, tucked into an arts hub from the Library Street Collective crowd. Nine beers share the tap wall with cider, wine, and a few pours of Four Roses, plus Gatorade on draft, which is either a hydration plan or a very good joke. There's a basketball hoop in the middle of the room, so you can earn the second round or at least pretend you did.

Cooter Brown's is a sprawling Carrollton beer bar where the tap list runs long enough to need a study guide, and the game is always on somewhere. There's a front bar for cocktails, a back bar for local experimental pours, and an oyster counter for people who ordered beer and then had ideas. Boudin balls and shots keep things moving. It's been the place to gather a group for a very long time.

This is a working distillery in Eastern Market, which means the tasting room serves what's made down the road, mostly whiskey, gin, and vodka, plus the occasional paczki vodka for Fat Tuesday, because Detroit. The lighting is moody, the cocktails shift with the seasons, and in summer the bar spills onto Riopelle Street, where Midnight Temple next door supplies the Indian street food. Eater counts it among Detroit's best bars.

The sign above the door reads "Getting Vegas Drunk Since 1962," and the bar delivers on that promise without much fuss. Dino's is a neon-free dive near the Arts District where drinks are cheap and the crowd skews toward people who own at least one ska-related t-shirt. Thursday through Saturday after ten, karaoke takes over the tiny stage and things get appropriately messy. Celebrities have been known to slip in for a song, which is very on-brand for a city like this.

Double D's is a wood-paneled cocktail bar that looks like a 1970s basement, and it behaves like two different bars depending on the hour. Around six it's draft Palomas and whiskey highballs, handy for a drink before dinner next door. By ten there's a line outside, a DJ working through hip-hop and R&B, and someone ordering a Razzle Dazzle shot to get the dancing started.

Graffiti and stickers cover every surface, dollar bills hang from the ceiling, and the smell of day-old bacon grease meets you at the door. Double Down is a dive bar in the Fruit Loop that's been hosting punk shows and burlesque nights since forever, drawing tattooed regulars and older locals who never look up from the video poker machines. Order a PBR, order an Ass Juice shot, and lower your expectations to CBGB levels accordingly.

Dragonfly is the casual bar next door to Freya's tasting menu, built for people who want a drink but would like to be a functioning adult tomorrow. The cocktails run low-alcohol or zero, flavored with herbal teas, cucumber, and natural sweeteners, so the drinks read more like a garden than a bar. The room is done in cool blues, and shareable plates keep the evening from becoming purely liquid.

Ernie's Boondock is a dive bar tucked below Up-Down in East Nashville, and it commits to the role with pool tables, dollar bills stuck to the walls, and a chain of Underberg hanging by the register. There's no cocktail menu, so order a gin and tonic or a tequila shot and accept the taxidermy's silent verdict from the red leather booths. Someone will mangle "Benny And The Jets" nearby, and you may join in.

A Houston brewery that takes its beer names as seriously as its beer, with year-round taps like Buckle Bunny (a cream ale) and a rotating Limited Awesome Beer Series that lives up to the acronym. The indoor space is cavernous enough to actually beat the heat, which in this city is less a perk than a survival strategy. When the weather cooperates, the outdoor area fills fast with the kind of crowd that stays for three rounds and means it.

The Kilt Lifter Scottish Ale has been filling pints here long enough that it's practically a local institution, and the Mission Revival warehouse it lives in only adds to the effect. Four Peaks is a full-scale brewpub with a cavernous brick interior, a sprawling patio, and a menu that covers wings and nachos but also green chile mac and cheese for anyone who needs more than bar food. Spring training crowds and ASU students pack the place, which tells you most of what you need to know about the vibe.

Ballpoint pen drawings cover every wall of this tiny lounge at The Venetian, which is doing its best Shinjuku Golden Gai impression, and pulling it off better than it has any right to. DJs push house music loud enough to rattle the sake glasses while the drinks lean Japanese, gin and matcha cocktails alongside serious whiskey pours. Small and clubby, with neon doing most of the decorating.

Gray's Hall is a South Boston wine bar that has the energy of a friend's living room, if your friend kept a natural-leaning wine list and a small-plate menu that includes a burger. It comes from the team behind American Provisions, the neighborhood's sandwich-and-bottle stop, so the instinct is to feed you while you stay put. Staff stay unbothered even when the place fills up, and a loyal local crowd keeps it that way.

The burger of the month rotates, the beer names do not disappoint, and the bar snacks lean harder than most breweries bother to. This Chapman Street brewery pours its own ales alongside house cocktails, wine, and THC options, so there's something for whoever you dragged along. The Flip Flop Cowboy amber and the pineapple-tangerine blonde tell you exactly what the vibe is before you've taken a sip.

The wraparound windows put both ends of the Strip in frame at once, the Eiffel Tower on one side and MGM's emerald glow on the other. This moody cocktail lounge inside the Waldorf Astoria runs Japanese-leaning bar snacks alongside drinks like a cherry cola old fashioned, and the vibe is firmly date-night. Go for the view, stay for the cocktails, and accept that you probably won't need dinner after.

The bar stools here are swings, which tells you everything about the mood. Heyday is a neighborhood restaurant and bar tucked into the courtyard of a midcentury hotel in Waikiki, leaning hard into the retro-tropical bit with mai tai variations and boozy slushies alongside cheesy toast and a fried mahi sandwich that reads as a Filet-o-Fish with ambitions. After dark, the Green Lady Cocktail Room in room eight opens as a dark lounge spilling into a palm-fringed courtyard.

A sports bar in Buckhead's Terminus building where the pork totcho, a tater tot mountain buried under pulled pork, queso, and barbecue sauce, makes the pretense of watching the game completely optional. Multiple screens cover whatever's on, regardless of sport or allegiance, and the menu runs from lobster nachos to shrimp tacos, the kind of spread that commits fully to the bit.

The cocktail menu is organized by spirit, which sounds obvious until you're deep into the amaro section wondering how you got there. Jane Jane is a cozy cocktail bar on 14th Street with a living-room feel, home-style snacks, and drinks that range from gin classics to Basque whiskey creations nobody else would think to make. Small, warm, and genuinely hard to leave once you've settled in.

Velvet couches and Victorian flourishes make this cocktail bar inside the Venetian feel like a drawing room where someone definitely had an affair. The drinks lean inventive and precise, with one arriving in a Viking horn-shaped glass, which is either theatrical or inspired depending on your mood. One of three strong cocktail options in the same hotel, Juliet is the one that leans opulent and a little moody.

Justini's is a cocktail bar on Dauphine Street that nods to Seal's and Bertha's, two Black woman-owned New Orleans bars, with a courtyard mural to prove the lineage. It's dressier than those, with chandeliers and little alcoves built for being noticed in. The drinks are colorful, including a berry martini and a purple champagne cocktail, and the kitchen turns out hot sausage tacos and a jerk BBQ burger.

Karbach started as a scrappy local outfit before Anheuser-Busch bought it, and the sprawling indoor-outdoor brewery taproom it became is a pretty honest reflection of that trajectory. The full kitchen punches past standard pub grub, with a Texas Wagyu smashburger and truffle parmesan fries alongside the Crawford Bock and Love Street. Big enough for a party, casual enough for a Tuesday, and a sister pizza spot sits next door for when the group can't agree.

Kelly's is a neighborhood dive in Hamtramck that has been pouring shots for factory workers since before anyone alive remembers a different Detroit. The back-yard doors are layered in stickers and signatures, the tin ceiling is still up, and the floors have finally been leveled, so your beer stays where you put it. Cans of Hamm's and Modelo are the order, and a rotating cast of food pop-ups handles dinner. Eater has it on its Detroit best bars list.

Kilmac's is a neighborhood pub in Oakcliff, with dark wood, properly poured Guinness, and the same owners as Old Monk, so it knows its way around a bar stool. The cocktail list goes past what the setting suggests, including a freezer martini and a toasted coconut daiquiri. Thin, New York-style pizzas show up too, and they taste better on the big back patio, where you can sprawl out like the weather owes you. The Infatuation has it on its Dallas bars list.

A Greek Salad martini built with Tomato Crop vodka and piparra brine should probably not work, and yet here we are. Kinda Nice is a Williamsburg cocktail bar from two Grand Army veterans who describe the vibe as late-night diner meets dive bar, which mostly means the drinks lean savory and strange in satisfying ways. A downstairs dive called Shenanigans is coming, if you need somewhere to spiral afterward.

The name comes from a childhood nickname meaning "heel of the bread," which tells you something about the spirit of the place. This Wallingford cocktail bar leans into a Soviet parlor aesthetic, all floral upholstery and earthy glassware, with a drinks list built around beets, birch syrup, mushrooms, and green walnut. Slavic snacks fill the gaps between rounds. For purists, a horseradish vodka shot is on the menu and waiting to have a word with you.

L.A. Jackson is the rooftop bar atop the Thompson in the Gulch, where a giant tree strung with tiny white lights sits in the middle like it's auditioning for a wedding. The cocktails lean on tangy shrubs, the sparkling rosé arrives with a guava pomegranate popsicle in it, and the hot chicken croquettes are the smart order. Weekend nights bring a DJ, so dress for a skyline and a crowd that came for both.

A converted firehouse turned wine bar with a retail shop stocking over 200 bottles you can also drink on the spot. The menu rotates around whatever the chef's neighbor harvests from the garden across the street, which keeps things genuinely seasonal in a way most places only claim. The backyard runs to lawn chairs and picnic blankets, with DJs on weekends. It landed on the New York Times Restaurant List and Bon Appétit's Best New Restaurants in the same year.

A miniature wrestling ring doubles as the karaoke stage, which tells you everything about the Lariat Bar's priorities. This White Center dive is floor-to-ceiling WWE memorabilia with an actual craft cocktail menu, a combination that shouldn't work as well as it does. The nonalcoholic drinks are listed under "Kayfabe," a wrestling term for keeping the fiction alive, which is either the nerdiest menu label in Seattle or the most honest one.