The 15 Best Places to Drink in Vietnam

A dinosaur skeleton hangs above the bar, which sets the tone pretty efficiently. The Haflington is a two-floor cocktail bar in the Old Quarter styled after the great natural history museums of Europe, all soft lighting, fossils, and shelves of old books. The menu, called The Jungle Book, runs from obscure classics to house signatures. It landed on Asia's 50 Best Bars list, which tracks with how seriously the cocktails are taken here.

The name is a dare and the room backs it up: raw brick, warm light, a towering back bar, and a heavy metal door that opens onto something that feels airlifted from Brooklyn into a Ho Chi Minh City colonial building. It's a proper cocktail bar, with barrel-aged mixes on the menu and bartenders who will skip the list entirely and write you a liquid prescription based on your mood. Old-school hip hop keeps the whole thing from taking itself too seriously.

The Graham Greene Martini is a permanent fixture on an otherwise rotating seasonal cocktail list, which tells you something about the crowd the Metropole's poolside thatched-roof bar is playing to. It's a small, polished space, plush armchairs and a few counter seats, with bar snacks that drift between Vietnamese summer rolls and fish and chips without apology. Gin and colonial nostalgia, basically.

An 11-metre bar stretches across an industrial space on the second floor of a colonial apartment block, floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides pulling in the street below. Layla is a cocktail bar run by the team behind Summer Experiment, and the drinks lean heavily on botanicals and spice. The entrance looks a little rough around the edges, which only makes the room feel more like a find. Named a 50 Discovery by Asia's 50 Best Bars.

Down an alleyway in District 1, this split-level cocktail bar has the bones of a speakeasy and the energy of somewhere bartenders actually drink on their nights off. Raw industrial walls, repurposed metal wheels turned into lights, and frames of music legends stacked everywhere set the tone. The drinks are the real draw, and the team behind the bar clearly knows it.

A suspended marlin hangs over the neon-lit bar at Use Bar, which is either arresting or unsettling depending on your relationship with taxidermy-scale sculpture. This cocktail bar in Hanoi organizes its menu by ingredient, each one spinning off into three distinct drinks, so grape alone accounts for a Verjus Aviation, a cobbler made with grape marc, and a grappa sour. It landed on The 50 Discovery list, and the concept earns it.