How can anyone objectively name the best drinking establishments in the world without visiting all of them*?
Well, some brave souls have tried, and here I collect some of their best suggestions — with the caveat that I, too, have not tried them all.
According to Drinks International magazine, the top 10 in 2015 were Artesian, London; The Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog, New York; Night Jar, London; Employees Only, New York (do you see some sort of pattern emerging here?); American Bar, London (yes?); The Baxter Inn, Sydney (what?); 28 Hongkong Street, Singapore; Happiness Forgets, London (whew); Connaught Bar, London; and Black Pearl, Melbourne.
What odds that the top 10 bars in the world are in just four cities in three countries? Incredible. I can’t imagine that some of the remote, romantic, fascinating, crazy, dangerous places I been to around the world didn’t get a look in.
Yet this list is ubiquitous. At the time of writing, my variously phrased searches for best bars and best pubs produced the same results. Do thy do good SEO or are there really no good bars outside of the predictable big cities?
So, I dug a little deeper.
While not offering a ranking, The Lonely Planet Guide’s website suggest such options at The Pelican Bar, Jamaica; Great Leap Brewing in Beijing; Monvínic in Barcelona; the Alibi Room in Vancouver; Golden Gai in Tokyo; Sky Pod in London; Storm Crow Tavern in Vancouver (hang on …) and Brickhouse in Vancouver (hmmmm.)
And according to readers of The Guardian, the best “boozers” include Winning Tip, New York; The King’s Head, Norwich; Fallons, Dublin (about time we saw an Irish bar here); Boadas, Barcelona; Beer Temple, Amsterdam; Fässla Brewery Bar, Germany; Story Hotel Bar, Sweden; Cat’s Eye Pub, Baltimore; Chinaski, Chile; Bar Isabel, Argentina; Oavalu Club, Fiji; and the Sky Bar, Bangkok (which is the only one on any of these lists I’ve actually visited. I can’t vouch for it, though, because it’s on the roof of one of Thailand’s tallest buildings, and it belted down with rain on the night I was there.)
*A nice idea, but mathematically impossible
