The Best Cocktail Bars Near GRACE, by the Record
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Rank 1. Gainsbourg
Cocktail Bar
A red velvet curtain parts and you're suddenly in a dimly lit, jazz-soaked room with clay walls hung in black-and-white photos of the man himself. Gainsbourg is a cocktail bar named after Serge, styled as an "American" bar but feeling more like a Paris side street, which suits the namesake just fine. The hedge-lined terrace works on a warm night, but the real pull is the moody interior.
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Rank 2. Hefner
Cocktail Bar
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Rank 3. Victoria
Cocktail Bar
The narrow room runs almost wall to wall with bar counter, lined with leather stools and framed by booth seating at each end. Victoria is a sleek cocktail bar on Potsdamer Strasse, a stretch that doesn't exactly telegraph "upmarket lounge," which may be why the crowd that found it feels faintly proprietary about the place. Dark wood panels, modern art, low light, the general sense that someone thought hard about this.
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Rank 5. Galander
Cocktail Bar
The owner built and decorated the room himself, then showed up in a waistcoat and bow tie to serve cocktails in it, which tells you almost everything about this cocktail bar in Kreuzberg. The space is comfortable rather than grand, with an upright piano at the back that gets used. It occupies an old German kneipe, and the bones of that neighborhood local are still very much present, which only makes the carefully made drinks feel more at home.
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Rank 6. Bar Amano
Cocktail Bar
Bird of paradise flowers in expensive vases, champagne in trough-sized ice buckets: Bar Amano does not pretend to be a dive. It's a hotel cocktail bar in Mitte with a lengthy list and bartenders happy to skip it entirely if you just tell them what you're drinking these days. The bay windows along the edge of the room are a good perch for watching Auguststraße do its thing.
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Rank 7. The Grand
Cocktail Bar
A granite bar the size of a small continent anchors this cocktail bar tucked around an internal courtyard in a townhouse that gives nothing away from the street. The room runs dark leather and dim light, and the menu leans into what it calls "restorative" drinks, fizzes and long pours served in bulbous wine glasses. The bleak façade is almost the point, keeping out anyone who needs a sign to find it.