The 10 Best Cocktail Bars in Nottingham

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide