The Top 23 Places to Drink Near Blok

The pub runs its own smallholding, kitchen garden, and bakery, so when the menu changes twice a day at this Welsh gastropub, it's because something was just harvested. Tom Watts-Jones trained at London's Anchor & Hope and brought that ethos to the Vale of Glamorgan, making everything from cultured butter to fresh pasta in-house. Sit in the bar, dining room, or garden for cooking that's unfussy but clearly serious about its ingredients.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #96 · Top 50 Gastropubs

A champagne and oyster bar tucked into a century-old Llandaff pub is a choice that takes confidence, and the Heathcock pulls it off without blinking. The menu changes twice daily, leans hard into nose-to-tail Welsh cooking, and shares a kitchen philosophy with sibling pub the Hare & Hounds in Aberthin. Sharing plates are the move here. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Bib Gourmand, and the kitchen garden out back keeps things seasonal whether you like it or not.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #74 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

The cocktails here come with QR codes explaining the science behind them, which sounds gimmicky until you're reading about rooftop honey and sea-salt chocolate fish scales at midnight. Lab 22 is a Cardiff cocktail bar that takes a genuinely theatrical approach to the glass, with bartenders who have been known to breathe fire in service of a drink. Ranked in the Top 50 Cocktail Bars, with Bar Team of the Year 2026 to its name.

1. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · Bar Team of the Year · Top 50 Cocktail Bars
2. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
3. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #24 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

The seasonal menu at this cocktail bar inside Cardiff's Duke Street Arcade is organized by decade, so you can sip something from the era of your choosing while pretending your taste was always this refined. Tucked just off the castle, Lowkey keeps the music low enough for conversation and runs on table service, which sets the tone. It landed on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list for 2026, and the classics are there if the concept doesn't grab you.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #47 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

A gastropub in the Gwent countryside where the menu changes every week, following whatever's coming in from local farms and suppliers. Josh and Hannah Byrne run the room while the kitchen turns out seasonal plates that lean into the landscape around them. The wine list favors small European producers working sustainably, which sounds earnest until you taste it. Good spot to land after a walk along the Usk.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #46 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

Four floors of a handsome old Bristol building given over entirely to cocktails, which feels like the right call. The Milk Thistle is a cocktail bar spread across a hidden vault, a lounge, and an attic, with the kind of eclectic decor that earns the word without apology. Drinks lean classic with house riffs woven in, and the team tends toward recommendations rather than leaving you to flounder. It ranks in the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
3. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #41 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

Graffiti-style caricatures mark the black exterior on Cheltenham Road, and inside, moody lighting and leather stools across two rooms make this cocktail bar feel like a neighbourhood spot that takes its drinks more seriously than its name suggests. The menu leans into an Asian-inflected playfulness, with the Scotch and Champagne, a Chinese classic dressed up with single malt and Moët, a good place to start. It placed 29th on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 list.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #29 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

You enter through a red phone box at the mouth of Clifton Down station, which tells you most of what you need to know. Inside, the British theme runs all the way down, cozy sofas for groups, limited bar stools, and a pocket-sized menu small enough to pocket as a souvenir. The small team runs it like a living room they're genuinely attached to, and the bar shows it. A cocktail bar with a spy name and a neighborhood heart.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

An antler chandelier greets you at the door of this two-floor cocktail bar on Cotham Hill, which runs bigger than its frontage suggests. The Scandinavian-leaning fit-out keeps things clean and calm, with booth seating that nudges the room toward intimate rather than cavernous. The team leans into service in a way that feels deliberate rather than performative, which on a Bristol hill is rarer than it should be.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Six miles of single-track road separates this former drovers' inn from Hay-on-Wye, which tells you something about the kind of quiet it keeps. Flagstone floors, slate walls, and open fires set the tone for farm-to-fork pub cooking that runs on meat from the owners' regenerative farm and produce from the surrounding Black Mountains valley. Dogs are welcome in the bar, cabins sit on the grounds, and the Sunday roast is not negotiable.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #59 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A graffiti-scrawled doorway, a seedy pay phone, a luminous red light, and then you're in. The neon sex sign above the stairs does a good job setting expectations that the bar itself immediately subverts: downstairs is calm, clean, and quietly serious about cocktails. It's a speakeasy in the Bristol tradition of making you work a little before rewarding you, and the theatrical entry is genuinely half the fun.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Pink flamingos and tropical foliage set the tone at this Bristol outpost of the London Cocktail Club, a high-energy cocktail bar that leans hard into a Peter Pan's Neverland theme and doesn't apologize for any of it. The vibe is unapologetically loud and playful, the kind of place where the décor alone commits harder than most people do on a Saturday night. Walk-ins welcome, which tells you all you need to know about the crowd.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Loose Cannon is a cocktail bar on Bristol's harbourside where local artists rotate work on the walls and the menu reads like a fever dream, pop-culture riffs on everything from Donkey Kong to Brexit. The drinks are inventive and aggressively garnished, the kind of place where your cocktail arrives wearing something. Students fill it most nights, and the energy leans young and loud in the best harbourside-dive-bar way.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A former village post office, the Pyne Arms sits deep in Devon's Exmoor National Park and has landed on the Top 50 Gastropubs list. It's a proper pub with rooms, the kind where the kitchen traces ingredients to within a few dozen miles and means it. Expect seasonal menus, Sunday roasts, good local ales, and an extensive gin list, all served in a building that looks like it has seen a few centuries pass without much fuss.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #98 · Top 50 Gastropubs

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The courtyard is the whole argument: a stage, original artwork, beach huts, and covered heated seating squeezed into a pub garden between Bristol and Bath. The licensee came up as a musician and built the programming around it, so live music runs through the calendar rather than landing as a Friday afterthought. A community local that won Best Pub for Entertainment at the Great British Pub Awards, which tells you what the priorities are.

1. Great British Pub Awards 2025 · Best Pub for Entertainment · Great British Pub Awards

A Glastonbury pub named after a tarot card, in an old coaching inn where the menu runs on Middle Eastern instinct and Somerset produce. The chef, of Jordanian heritage and French training, spent summers cooking with her grandmother in Jordan before stints at The Palomar and a Michelin-starred spot in Anglesey shaped her into someone who can make a shish barak feel completely at home in the West Country. The Michelin Guide awards it a Bib Gourmand.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · Chef of the Year · Top 50 Gastropubs · Ayesha Kalaji
2. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #42 · Top 50 Gastropubs
3. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A Devon country pub where the kitchen forages, ferments, and smokes most of what ends up on your plate. The menu reads like a walk across the local landscape, duck fat hash browns alongside venison "sausage" and pickled walnut, with real ale treated as seriously as the food. A monthly communal supper packs strangers around the same table for three family-style courses, which is either your idea of heaven or the reason you book early to avoid it.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #100 · Top 50 Gastropubs

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

Tucked into Lilliput Court, this cocktail bar occupies a building that locals will tell you was bricked up and forgotten for years, historically used by thieves and smugglers who found Bath's Georgian law enforcement inconvenient. The outlaw theme runs through the menu, with cocktails named for famous criminals. An extensive whisky selection sits alongside, for when you'd rather just drink like a reprobate without the narrative. Ranked 13th on Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #13 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide