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Cocktail Bars Around The World Everyone Is Trying To Get Into

Grand Cafe, Paris

Velvet banquettes, impossible reservations, live piano and crisp, cold negronis: after-dark revelry is back in fashion and these are the places to elbow your way into. By NATASHA BIRD

Lifestyle
Red Room at The Connaught, London

Red Room, The Connaught, London

The Connaught Bar is a longtime haunt for sophisticated crowds, especially if you like a stiff martini. However, hidden behind a velvet curtain inside the famous hotel is an alluring little secret. The Red Room is another of London’s favorite late-night addresses: a scarlet-tone salon adorned with Louise Bourgeois artworks, jewel-box lighting and a selection of rare vintages poured by the glass. In 2026, as fashion swings away from a more obviously ‘sceney’ mood and back towards cultivated discretion (riding the tailcoats of ‘quiet luxury’), the Red Room’s hush-hush glam is perfect.

Loulou, Paris

Loulou has perfected a delightfully Parisian form of social theater: long, long cigarette-and-wine-fueled lunches, dissolving into early-eve aperitifs beneath the arcades of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This year, for its 10th anniversary, the institution has unveiled a new Joseph Dirand-designed bar, imbuing the place with nighttime allure. The cocktail menu is indulgent and playful. Think pistachio martinis, bergamot spritzes and strawberry bellinis. The room itself adds a gin-soaked element to a venue that was already a defining luxury meeting point.

Röda Huset, Stockholm

Stockholm is easily one of Europe’s most influential design capitals and Röda Huset is quintessential Scandi fare: intelligent, understated, composed. Set inside a former auction house opposite the waterfront, the bar has earned international acclaim for cocktails built almost entirely around Nordic ingredients, from spruce shoots to cloudberries. The room mirrors the city’s wider bar aesthetic of warm minimalism and well-appointed candlelight

The Nines, New York

Situated above downtown institution Acme on Great Jones Street, The Nines has rapidly become a buzzy-but-chic and seriously tricky to get into address in Manhattan. It’s the sort of place where dinner slips easily into a piano rendition of Fleetwood Mac at 1am. Inspired by the grand lobby bars of old European hotels, the room balances red velvet cushioning with a distinctly New York looseness. Its growing reputation among the city’s most stylish figures – Anna Wintour and Gigi Hadid among them – has only intensified the difficulty of securing a table.

Gold Bar at EDITION, Tokyo

Gold Bar at the Tokyo EDITION, Toranomon, has injected Tokyo’s post-pandemic world with gilded opulence for the ages. An Ian Schrager brainchild and designed with Kengo Kuma’s signature sensual minimalism, the room glows with amber light reflected off mirrored gold surfaces. Unlike the formality of many of Tokyo’s more traditional cocktail lairs, Gold Bar is a little bit friskier. You can flirt with naughtiness, tuck into some good stories and experience a rotating host of internationally acclaimed bartenders and global mixology takeovers.

La Coquille d’Or, Château Voltaire, Paris

If you want to jostle with the who’s who of Paris, you obviously have to head to the bar at Hotel Costes. Costes has been a sensation since the ’90s. However, if you want to capture the same mood but a little off the beaten path, then La Coquille d’Or, the bar inside Château Voltaire, is the place to head. Tucked between the Opéra and the Tuileries, the hotel attracts a cultured crowd drawn to its literary Left Bank spirit and immaculate design. The bar itself nods to old Paris with polished wood, low lamps and stiff drinks served straight-up. It’s a place to disappear until the early hours.

Featuring: The Nines, New York; Gold Bar, Tokyo; La Coquille d’Or, Paris
Featuring: Handshake Speakeasy, Mexico City; Moyagi, London

Moyagi, London

Karaoke has always occupied a curious position in the cultural cycle, sometimes deeply uncool, sometimes irresistibly chic and reversing itself every few years. Moyagi, in 2026, has definite fashion credentials. Hidden beneath Soho, it is a warm cave of low lighting, black interiors and private rooms echoing Tokyo members’ clubs. Its status was cemented this year after hosting a particularly hot fashion-week party, packed with models, editors and designers, making it a natural magnet for stylish copycat crowds.

Handshake Speakeasy, Mexico City

If you’ve been sleeping on Mexico City… well, don’t. Chock-full of Michelin-level dining and truly great bars, the city has been on the ascent as one of the world’s great luxury capitals for a while now. Handshake Speakeasy is a den in Colonia Juárez behind an unmarked door, serving some of the most inventive and delicious drinks in the world. The atmosphere lands somewhere between Gatsby-era debauchery and an Edward Hopper painting: shadowy Art Deco interiors, dressed-up crowds and loose tongues, helped by a stream of international creatives, chefs and collectors.

Featuring: The Polo Lounge, Los Angeles; Himitsu, Dubai

The Polo Lounge, Los Angeles

The Polo Lounge is hardly new news, but few dining rooms carry the mythology of old Hollywood quite like it. For decades, the pink-walled fixture inside The Beverly Hills Hotel has functioned as a Los Angeles power-breakfast spot, deal-making haunt and celebrity refuge since…forever. This summer, though, the bar is hosting a tribute to what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, including a reimagined version of her beloved maraschino-vanilla soufflé and a Champagne mimosa made with her preferred Grand Marnier-spiked recipe. And that, as they say, is a moment.

Himitsu, Dubai

Dubai’s nightlife scene has entered a more sophisticated chapter. Once the preserve of towering platform stilettos, now there’s a mood better typified by a Saint Laurent ‘Jeanne.’ Himitsu sits at the center of that evolution. Nestled within the city’s ever-expanding constellation of ultra-luxury destinations, the Japanese-inspired cocktail bar is a hidden, 15-seat speakeasy tucked away discreetly inside Alba restaurant at the Dubai Opera Plaza. The after-parties here live on in whispered stories.

Kwãnt, London

London nightlife is always immensely varied, but appetite for gimmicks is waning in favor of elegance at the moment. Kwãnt is well calibrated for 2026, being seductive and cocooning, but relatively un-showy. Tucked beneath Momo in Mayfair, the bar was created by late-night maestro Erik Lorincz. There are no crazy theatrical flourishes, but you can get a faultless gimlet. During buzzier weeks, securing one of the curved velvet banquettes requires genuine forward-planning.

Sip & Guzzle, New York

New York’s appetite for Japanese hospitality rages on unabated, but few openings have generated as much buzz as Sip & Guzzle. Created by celebrated bartender Shingo Gokan, the two-level Greenwich Village destination splits its personality between the more refined “Sip” upstairs and the irreverent “Guzzle” below, where Japanese drinking culture collides with downtown New York energy. Since being crowned North America’s best bar, reservations have become fiercely competitive, fueled by a clientele spanning chefs, fashion creatives, gallery figures and in-the-know travelers.

Le Bar du Grand Café, Grand Palais, Paris

Paris is in the midst of a brasserie revival, and none is more perfect for 2026 than the newly reopened Grand Café inside the Grand Palais. Another Joseph Dirand design, the vast room pairs the best of the Belle Époque with more contemporary soaring ceilings and some fun live jazz every night. At the center sits the bar itself, where legendary bartender Colin Field deals in immaculate classics, like French 75s, Sidecars and Negronis.

COA, Hong Kong

Long before agave spirits became a global luxury obsession, COA was introducing Hong Kong’s collectors, designers and hospitality crowd to the intricacies of mezcal and tequila. Founded by Jay Khan and named after the traditional harvesting tool used for agave, the intimate bar has since become one of Asia’s most preeminent cocktail destinations in Hong Kong’s Central district, repeatedly ranking among the best in the world. Despite the accolades, it still has a warm, unpretentious atmosphere and an unfussy approach to nightlife. That doesn’t mean you’ll easily get a table though…

Sip & Guzzle, New York

Overstory, New York

On the 64th floor of a landmark Art Deco tower in the Financial District, Overstory has made the once-overlooked lower tip of Manhattan a bit more of a destination, if you know how to find it. Panoramic skyline views in the Big Apple are always spectacular, wherever you can get them, but the appeal of this particular bar is its immaculate service and signature Terroir Old Fashioned. Thank us later.

Bvlgari Bar, Rome

Bvlgari Bar, Rome

The Bvlgari Hotel Roma makes the best of a grand situation, with a rooftop aperitivo haven boasting sweeping views across the Mausoleum of Augustus. The terrace is hard to book, naturally, but it is one of Europe’s key luxury gathering spots, so what would you expect? In 2026, as maximalism edges back into fashion, this is the place to dress decadently and delight in it.

Bar Crenn, San Francisco

As San Francisco’s luxury landscape continues to evolve beyond the tech-world and insanely good sushi, Bar Crenn has emerged as a sophisticated winner. Conceived by Dominique Crenn as an extension of her three-Michelin-starred culinary universe, the intimate salon is akin to a Left Bank cocktail lounge, with velvet banquettes, rare spirits, and truly great wines. The menu draws heavily from French aperitif culture, with ingredient-led cocktails designed to complement caviar, oysters and delicate seafood dishes.

Lalin, Waldorf Astoria Seychelles Platte Island

When we said these bars might be difficult to get into, in this case we meant that you might have to charter a plane. Private-island luxury is on the absolute up-and-up this year and, of course, the bars don’t get much more exclusive than these. Lalin at Waldorf Astoria Seychelles Platte Island is named after the Creole word for ‘moon’ and the Champagne bar is designed around the slow transition from sunset to starlight. Cocktails with ocean views at Lalin are trumped only by the ‘Champagne rock’ sundowner experience, wherein the staff create a natural bottle-bath with ice in a concave boulder. The epitome of luxury.

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