The Best Places to Eat and Drink in Madrid

The bar counter here was custom-built to one level so every bartender works the same station, which tells you something about how seriously Kevo Jacoby runs the room. This snug cocktail bar in the Salamanca neighborhood is built around classics, with signatures that riff and twist rather than reinvent. The owner is usually your bartender, which, after stints pouring drinks across several countries, makes him someone worth talking to.

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

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

A discreet door off the street opens into a dim, velvet-and-shadow cocktail bar styled after the private haunts of 1970s New York's moneyed class. The concept is unabashedly theatrical, and the drinks lean into it: the team uses fine-dining technique to render things like tiramisu and cinnamon rolls as cocktails, which sounds gimmicky until you're two in and reconsidering your life choices. Difford's Guide has taken notice.

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1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

A cocktail bar on Calle de las Huertas where the espresso martini comes with a sustainability footnote, made with vanilla beans recycled from other productions and cold brew steeped for a full day. The philosophy, as the team puts it, is product, service, and experience in harmony, which sounds lofty until the drink arrives and the argument makes itself. Difford's Guide has taken note.

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The cocktail menu runs to eight drinks, and the team seems to regard that as plenty. Inclán Brutal Bar is a cocktail bar in Centro where the glassware is as considered as what's in it, trompe l'oeil details and all. The short list swings between originals and classics treated with unusual fidelity, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. A good room to visit when you want someone to have thought very hard about your drink.

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A cocktail bar in Retiro that names itself after danger and more or less means it. The house Espresso Martini runs on Ketel One infused with vanilla, Pedro Ximénez, homemade banana syrup, cold brew, and cacao bitters, finished with a cacao crumble and dehydrated plantain chips. The coffee comes from a neighborhood shop that works with small local farmers, which is a surprisingly earnest detail for a bar with this much attitude.

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The Lobby Bar at The Madrid Edition is the kind of hotel cocktail bar where the room does most of the talking, all marble and low light and the quiet confidence of people who have somewhere to be later. The signature espresso martini uses Café Baque coffee, a Madrid roaster with roots in local farming communities, which gives the bar's small-batch conscience something to actually point to.

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

Mirrored walls and warm wood paneling line this cocktail bar on Echegaray, Madrid's reliable street for a late night out. The signature Espresso Martini swaps the usual formula for cold brew, house coffee liqueur, and local heather honey sourced from a neighborhood beekeeper working on native bee recovery, which is a more interesting origin story than most bars bother with. The room gets festive well before midnight.

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1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

The signature Espresso Martini swaps refined sugar for raw honey sourced from a small Guadalajara beekeeper, which is either a genuinely thoughtful choice or the most Spanish possible way to make a cocktail sound like a nature documentary. Either way, the drink is built around Ketel One macerated in rosemary and house coffee liqueur. This is a hotel cocktail bar inside the JW Marriott, polished and well-positioned, with Difford's Guide taking note.

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1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

The Espresso Martini here comes with a coffee foam, an egg yolk, and a cookie wafer sourced from a local convent whose proceeds go to people in need, which gives ordering a cocktail a quietly unusual moral weight. Santos y Desamparados is a bar in Madrid's Centro, the kind where a drink can arrive with a small story attached. The room pulls in locals who know where they are, geographically and otherwise.

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1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

The Espresso Martini here gets the fat-washing treatment, with Ketel One infused with dark chocolate and a coffee liqueur steeped in orange peel, finished under a coconut and white chocolate foam. Zingara is a cocktail bar near Plaza de Salesas whose menu drifts between cultures by design, the name nodding to Romani nomadism. Difford's Guide lists it among bars worth knowing in Madrid.

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