The Best Places to Drink and Stay in Zagreb

Built for passengers stepping off the Orient Express, the Esplanade is Zagreb's grande dame hotel, all Art Deco curves and goose-down beds in a city still waiting for its first boutique challenger. The lobby and cocktail lounge have the hushed drama the style promises, and the ballroom is genuinely monumental. A Michelin Key hotel, and the kind of place that makes a marble bathroom feel like the obvious minimum.

Every room in this central Zagreb hotel doubles as a gallery dedicated to Boris Bućan, one of Croatia's most recognized contemporary artists, whose bold graphic work covers walls, corridors, and common areas with actual intention rather than decorative filler. The Art Déco bones of the building hold a spa, indoor pool, rooftop bar with city views, and YEZI, a pan-Asian restaurant worth skipping lunch for.

Cartoon reruns play on loop while serious cocktails arrive at the bar, and that contrast is more or less the whole thesis of Peaches & Cream. It's a neighborhood cocktail bar near the Trešnjevka market, with a deliberately loose, anything-goes room that keeps the mood easy without letting the drinks slip. Named a Discovery by The 50, it has become a reference point for Zagreb's cocktail scene, which is high praise for somewhere that doesn't seem to be trying very hard.

A former cinema with an all-glass facade, Urania Bar pulls off the dual life of specialty coffee shop by day and cocktail bar by night without either half feeling like an afterthought. Tucked off the main road on Kvaternik Square, the high-ceilinged room centers on a communal table where laptops and Negronis coexist peacefully. Cocktails run from reworked classics to originals, and tapas help justify a longer stay.