The Best Places to Drink in the United States

Roosevelt Row gets a proper grown-up restaurant in Pretty Penny, where every table starts with a complimentary pour of bubbles and the kitchen sends out housemade pastas, bold proteins, and an octopus tostada that earned a spot on Phoenix Magazine's top dishes list. The forest-green room is sleek without being stiff, and the bar program holds its own, landing in the Spirited Awards' regional top ten for best new cocktail bar.

No televisions anywhere, which tells you everything about the clientele. Swift is an Irish pub in NoHo named for the author of Gulliver's Travels, and the room looks like it's been quietly absorbing conversation since forever: long winding bar, exposed brick, reclaimed church pews, barstools worn in just right. Creative types fill it looking for somewhere to talk without shouting over a game. Civilised is the word.

The cocktail program here was curated by David Wondrich, which tells you something. This is a whiskey bar on the second floor of the Michter's Fort Nelson Distillery, and it leans into that setting without apology: classic whiskey cocktails, a deep roster of bottles, modern riffs, and a handful of alcohol-free options, all served in custom glassware. The room is warm and unhurried, the kind of place that makes bourbon tourism feel less like homework.

The Vault is a cocktail bar tucked behind a gilded door inside the Bellagio, occupying what used to be the casino's actual cage, which gives the whole room a pleasantly loaded history. A chandelier does most of the atmospheric heavy lifting. The drink list leans into vintage spirits and old recipes, so if you're not sure what you want, describe an era and let them run with it.

A plate-glass window in the exposed-brick wall looks straight into a working still, which tells you everything about what kind of cocktail bar this is. The Shanty is the front room of New York Distilling Company, so the gin in your glass traveled about twenty feet to get there. It sits on a quiet warehouse block in Greenpoint, easy to miss, which seems to suit the regulars just fine.

The low-slung 19th-century building gets swallowed by Midtown towers on all sides, which somehow makes it feel more defiant. P.J. Clarke's is an old-school Manhattan pub, dark-paneled and unhurried, with a worn mahogany bar, a zinc oyster counter, and photos of former barkeeps watching over things. Nothing much has changed since the gaslight era, and the crowd at the rail seems to prefer it that way.

A Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole anchors this small, high-ceilinged hotel cocktail bar inside the St. Regis, and it's been staring down the room since the Golden Age of illustration. The bar's other claim to history is the Bloody Mary, which Fernand Petiot is said to have perfected here. The menu still leans into that, which is either heritage or a hint. Either way, the room is beautiful and the drinks are stiff.

Inside the Hauser & Wirth arts complex in the Arts District, Manuela is a restaurant and bar where conceptual art hangs on the walls and the cooking tilts Southern with a serious commitment to local ingredients, some grown in their own garden. Cocktails use house-made bitters and tonics, and the food is the kind that makes a gallery crowd linger well past closing time.

The sunchoke doughnuts with XO gouda are reportedly un-removable from the menu, which tells you something about this Davis Square wine bar. The list leans toward small producers and natural winemakers, and the staff actually know it. Small plates from the kitchen are the kind of thing a food scientist might dream up on a generous budget. A James Beard Outstanding Bar semifinalist for 2026.

Hand-cut blocks of ice imported from Japan are the first clue that this isn't a typical whiskey bar. Tucked into the Las Vegas Arts District, Bar Ginza models itself on the quiet whiskey bars of Tokyo, with more than 90 Japanese bottles lining brick walls and flights structured as an omakase. If you don't know where to start, the co-owner behind the bar is happy to pour his way through an education.

Commune is a listening room and wine bar in Avondale Estates where the DJ booth and the sommelier carry equal weight. Steven Grubbs, formerly of Empire State South, steers an evolving list that includes Georgia wine from Crane Creek Vineyards, a rarity in Atlanta. Food runs from oysters and caviar to roasted chicken, enough to anchor a full evening. Deep-house and indie keep things moving long after the dessert wine arrives.

The terrace hangs over the mouth of the Miami River where it meets Biscayne Bay, which sets the tone for everything else. This is the bar inside Zuma, the Japanese cocktail and sake operation anchored inside the Epic Hotel, done up in granite, rice paper paneling, and Indonesian wood by a Tokyo designer. The crowd arrives dressed for a scene, which is more or less the point. Sake flights and Japanese-inflected cocktails are the move.

A plain wooden door down a sketchy Belltown alley opens into a speakeasy-style cocktail bar that fits maybe thirty people across two floors. Upstairs, the intimate bar puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with shelves stacked with cocktail books. The menu runs to eight drinks, but the move is Dealer's Choice: name your spirit, name your mood, and let the bartender figure out the rest.

The bullet holes in the walls are original, and so is the escape route through the ladies' lavatory. This Tenderloin cocktail bar started life as a Prohibition speakeasy, complete with a trapdoor and password, and neither gimmick has been retired. The 1920s painted wallpaper and marble staircase survived intact, and you still need the password to get in, which is either charming or exhausting depending on your mood.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with bottles replace the books here, and the ladders are real. This TriBeCa spirits bar has made brandy its organizing principle, stocking vintage Armagnacs, Cognacs, and plum brandies from corners of the world most bars have never considered. Whisky and rum fill the gaps, the cocktail list runs a hundred drinks deep, and the staff who climb those ladders to fetch your bottle know exactly what they're doing.

The zinc-topped bar inside the Ace Hotel is where Jeffrey Morgenthaler built his reputation, and Portland's cocktail crowd hasn't forgotten it. Clyde Common is technically a big, open dining hall, but the bar runs the show here, with vintage stools filling up fast under a double-height ceiling loud with conversation. The food is genuinely good, but nobody's coming just for dinner.

Pasta and vegetables carry most of the weight here, at this bright, sun-flooded Italian restaurant in Logan Square that holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The house-made pappardelle and rigatoni keep regulars coming back, but the onion dip with house-made ruffles has become a thing people talk about. A bakery tucked in the back means the pastry situation at the end of a meal is genuinely hard to navigate. The bar program turns heads too, a James Beard semifinalist for hospitality.

Tucked into Mandarin Plaza on Broadway, this contemporary Chinese American restaurant and bar is the project of a first-generation chef cooking his own story onto the plate. The cocktail program is serious enough to earn national bartender recognition, so start there before the food arrives. Dishes are built for sharing, the kitchen is open to the room, and the whole setup feels more like a dinner party than a transaction.

The cocktail bar on the second floor of the landmark Metropolitan Life building, where the ceilings are tall enough to make you feel like you should order something serious. The drinks program travels with the restaurant group globally, which keeps the bar from feeling like an afterthought to the dining room below. A polished crowd in no hurry fills the seats most evenings, and the room does most of the work before the first drink arrives.

Plant-based Peruvian tasting menus in Shaw sounds like a premise that requires a disclaimer, yet Mita holds a Michelin star and a James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant. The chef's team pulls from across Latin America, so the flavors run from Andean to coastal without apology. Two tasting menu lengths mean you can commit at whatever level feels reasonable on a Tuesday. The bar program is serious enough that Punch named the team among its best new bartenders.

The bookshelves and well-worn wood make My Loup feel less like a supper club and more like someone's very good dinner party. The French-leaning menu reads casual but cooks with real intent, seasonal and confidently seasoned, the kind of food where the chef is clearly enjoying themselves. The bar is no afterthought either, named among Punch's best new bartenders. The New York Times and Bon Appétit both took notice, and it's easy to see why.

A long sloping entry leads you up into a warm, modern room where communal high tables split the space between a serious bar and proper wood-fired pizza. Ryan Magarian's cocktail program is the draw here, pairing classics and house originals with Italian street food from the kitchen. The design reads clean rather than cozy, which suits the crowd that comes as much for the drinks as anything coming out of that oven.

A hundred-foot marble bar runs the length of the room, and the apothecary shelving, brass fixtures, and velvet accents make the whole place feel like a Victorian soda fountain that took a wrong turn into a Parisian atrium. This cocktail bar in Normal Heights has been an anchor of the San Diego drinks scene for ages, built around housemade bitters, syrups, and sodas long before that was a cliché.

Reservations required, a three-night-a-week window, and a bouncer who greets you like a long-lost relative: Saxony sets the terms before you've touched a drink. This late-night cocktail bar lives beneath the Faena Hotel, down a staircase into a basement of black terrazzo, gold-leaf ceilings, and Art Deco bones, with a DJ running things until 4am. The crowd arrived on purpose and dressed accordingly.

The dark oak bar counter twists through the room like it couldn't decide where to stop, with booths opposite and vintage paneling that makes the whole place feel like it's been here forever. It's a steakhouse bar in Ballard's old commercial strip, and while drinks are the stated purpose, the kitchen has a way of making that position hard to defend. Difford's Guide gives it five stars.

The conceit is that a London Underground station was abandoned in 1890, rediscovered, and quietly converted into a gin clubhouse, and the room commits to the bit completely. A cocktail bar from the team behind Smuggler's Cove, Whitechapel stocks a staggering wall of gins and divides into three areas, including an oxidized-patina bar counter called The Platform. Come for a gin and tonic; stay because you forgot you were on Polk Street.

The menu lists a spicy margarita riff called The Party Lobster, which tells you most of what you need to know about the vibe. Mister Paradise is a cocktail bar in the East Village where the drinks are built with serious technique, clarification, sous-vide, the works, but presented with enough wit and noise that you'd never call it stuffy. Locals land here and stop leaving, which is either a warning or a recommendation depending on your Thursday.

The dining room at this West Hollywood EDITION hotel restaurant looks like a luxury spa that decided to feed people: white velvet booths, staff in beige, and enough greenery to require a groundskeeper. The menu leans vegetable-forward but keeps dry-aged lamb and steaks around for the unconvinced. Prices sit firmly in hotel territory, which the hotel guests seem not to notice.

The original Dear Irving on Irving Place is a cocktail bar that commits hard to the speakeasy aesthetic, complete with dim lighting, velvet, and the sense that someone might ask for a password. The menu roams across classics, seasonal builds, and aperitivo riffs, so there's always a reason to linger past the first round. A Spirited Awards Regional Honoree, it draws a dressed-up crowd that takes its evening seriously without taking itself too seriously.

The $12 daily daiquiri sets the tone at this Williamsburg rum bar, where the menu runs from a lager-and-rum shot combo to oysters with tepache mignonette. The couple behind it know their way around spirits, one having run the editorial side of Punch, the other having shaped Chicago's beloved tropical bar scene. A basement rum bar called Undercurrent adds another layer for anyone who shows up and doesn't want to leave.

The taproom is built to look like a church, which feels appropriate given how seriously Houstonians take their hometown brewery. Texas's oldest craft brewery pours its own Art Car IPA, Amber Ale, and H-Town Pils alongside a full kitchen running stone-fired pizzas and bar bites. The outdoor garden catches a downtown view when the heat relents. A good place to convert someone still loyal to Miller Lite.

A photo wall of Diana Taurasi greets you at the door, which tells you everything about what kind of sports bar this is. Planted in Phoenix's Melrose district, Title 9 is a beer bar and grill built around women's athletics, with imagery spanning players to sports journalists across every wall. The color palette reads as a quiet nod to the lesbian pride flag, a detail that fits the neighborhood perfectly.

Royal blue booths, an open kitchen you can pull a counter seat at, and a baked Alaska that arrives on fire make the room feel like it has something to prove, in a good way. Bludorn is a New American restaurant and bar where the menu swings wide, from oysters (some Texan) to cioppino to seafood towers. The chef is a James Beard semifinalist, and the hospitality is the kind that makes you notice it without being able to say why.

Caipirinhas built from fresh sugar-cane juice anchor this small Brazilian bar and kitchen in Adams Morgan, where a vinyl soundtrack keeps the room at a low simmer all night. The open kitchen sends out charcoal-oven dishes and fried tapioca squares with spicy guava sauce that Washingtonian singled out as a favorite dish of the year. A James Beard semifinalist for Best New Bar, it draws the kind of crowd that skips the menu on the second visit.

Club Frills is a cocktail bar dressed as a 70s basement, with fake wood paneling, a disco ball, and tabletops that are marble only in spirit. It wears the dive costume without the sticky floors or the low prices. The drinks run low-ABV and funky, often in colors not found in nature, and the kitchen turns out a burger built around diced olives. It was a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service.