The Top 18 Places to Drink Near Hambleton Hall
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A cocktail bar inside a Georgian building that used to be a servicemen's club, which explains the gold-lettered sporting champions still running along the wood-panelled walls. You enter through a zen garden, then find Regency furniture sharing the room with lacquered tables and backlit eastern cloth overhead. It sounds like it shouldn't work, and yet the collision of imperial England and East Asia somehow holds together without trying too hard.
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Bartenders here refrigerate their vermouths and will tell you about it unprompted, which tells you most of what you need to know about this High Pavement cocktail bar. The crowd runs from serious stirred-drink obsessives to first-timers who still want the glow-stick, and the bar somehow serves both without flinching. Old-school standards, no dress code about it.
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Rank 4. House of Coco Tang
Cocktail Bar
House of Coco Tang starts the evening as a proper cocktail bar, with house-infused spirits and sipping tequilas, and ends it as something considerably louder. The transformation is gradual enough that you can pick your moment: arrive early for the considered drinks, stay later if the party is what you came for. Either way, the bartenders are keeping standards through both versions of the night.
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Puffer fish lights hang from the ceiling and Easter Island heads line the back bar, but the graffiti covering half the walls makes this small Hockley tiki bar feel more like a house party than a South Seas fantasy. It's a deliberately scruffy version of the genre, tucked on a side street next to the kind of vodka bar everyone pretends not to know. The drinks, not the decor, are doing the heavy lifting.
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Rank 7. Saint Bar
Cocktail Bar
Wood-panelled walls, green leather seats, and a marble counter set the tone for this late-night hotel cocktail bar on High Pavement. The Nottingham Arena is close enough that whoever's headlining that night might be on the next barstool. Ring the bell if it's late and the door's locked. The menu runs from classics to house concoctions that are genuinely divisive, which is at least more interesting than inoffensive.
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A thatched-roof country pub on the Great River Ouse, The Sun has the kind of postcard exterior that makes you wonder if the food can possibly keep up. It does. The kitchen runs its own farm, so "local ingredients" isn't just menu copywriting here. The bar hatch turns out goat curry and fritto misto alongside pints, while the seasonal tasting menu leans into beef shin, smoked trout, and whatever the farm is doing that week.
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Rank 9. Living Room
Cocktail Bar
A white baby grand piano anchors the ground floor of this polished cocktail bar on High Pavement, part of a chain but cleaner and lighter than that suggests. Dining is upstairs, so the street-level room is drinks only, with windows looking out onto what is now a Pitcher & Piano, which does give the whole thing a mildly recursive quality. Cocktails are solid; the menu leans into "house favourites, irresistibly priced," which is doing some work.
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Rank 10. Minus One
Cocktail Bar
Underneath Escucha and very aware of it, Minus One is a basement cocktail lounge that leans closer to club than it usually lets on, with low light, polished surfaces, and a touch of bling. DJs are a regular fixture, live music turns up occasionally, and the food menu is more substantial than the vibe suggests. Order something off the beaten track and you may watch the bartender quietly consult the spec sheet, but the classics come out well.
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Rank 12. Tilt
Cocktail Bar
A small doorway on Pelham Street opens onto a staircase, which is your only warning before you arrive at a two-floor cocktail bar and blues club with a spit-and-sawdust soul. Drinks come from a tiny bar tucked under the stairs, and the menu runs to combinations that would raise an eyebrow elsewhere, Campari and Patron XO among them, pulled off with more confidence than the setting suggests. There is also a £35 cocktail called Barry Big Bollocks.
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Rank 13. Harts
Cocktail Bar
The cocktail bar attached to Harts restaurant tends to get overshadowed by the dining room next door, which suits the regulars fine. It's a small, relaxed space with red leather sofas and generic hotel art that nobody is here to look at. The drinks list runs classic cocktails alongside wines and champagne options, and the mixing is careful without being showy. A quiet spot to start an evening before the kitchen calls.
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Rank 15. Saltwater
Cocktail Bar
The roof garden is the reason to climb to the third floor of what is generously described as a food court, plastic palm trees, fairy lights, and all-weather heaters doing their best to make Forman Street feel like somewhere. This cocktail bar splits its menu into Old Skool and Nu-Skool drinks, which is the kind of branding that dates itself immediately, though the drinks themselves hold up well enough to earn three stars from Difford's Guide.
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A pub whose back garden is so large it hosts its own Oktoberfest, sausage toss included. Inside, The Black Pug is a warren of cosy rooms; outside, there's covered seating, an outdoor bar, and enough room for a grumble of actual pugs, which is both the collective noun and, on any given weekend, an accurate headcount. Pizza Monday, Taco Tuesday, and free kids' meals on Friday keep the locals cycling through. Star Pub of the Year at the Great British Pub Awards 2025.
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Rank 17. The Cross
Contemporary British Pub
The dining room here was once a schoolroom, and the hand bell wall lamps haven't let anyone forget it. This Michelin-starred gastropub in a restored Grade II listed inn does serious British cooking, the kind that follows the seasons closely and sources with equal care. The back room looks straight onto the kitchen pass if you want the theatre. The tasting menu is how the kitchen makes its fullest argument.
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Rank 18. The Two Pigs
Modern British
The name changed from the Red Lion to The Two Pigs in 2023, and so did pretty much everything else. It's a gastropub in a Staffordshire village, doing modern pub classics with produce from local farmers and a micro-farm next door. Weekend brunches, Sunday roasts, seasonal cocktails, and bar snacks running all day give the place an all-hours, good-time quality that most gastropubs only manage for dinner service.