The best bar in London right now is a narrow room off Scrutton Street with an indigo ceiling, no reservations and a separate menu for the people waiting outside. It is called Waltz, it opened last year, and it did not exist when we last wrote this guide.
That is the shape of London drinking in 2026. The hotel rooftops have stopped being interesting, the hard-to-find speakeasy is a solved problem, and the rooms worth your evening are mostly small, mostly run by the bartenders themselves, and mostly indifferent to whether you can get in.
Below are 54 of them, sorted by where they are rather than by how clever they are. Prices are what we have seen on current menus. Where a bar has a door policy that will catch you out, it says so in the first line, because there is nothing worse than turning up somewhere that turns out to be members only.
Soho and the West End
Bar Américain at Brasserie Zédel
20 Sherwood Street, W1F 7ED · walk-ins always welcome, limited tables bookable
Bar Américain sits off the Art Deco basement of Brasserie Zédel under Piccadilly, and it is the most reliable good-looking drink in central London because you can almost always get in.
The list is arranged chronologically, with a date beside every drink and the bartender who invented it credited underneath: a 1901 Bronx at £14.75, a 1930 Corpse Reviver No. 1 at £16, a 1951 Diamondback at £15.50. The move is the Tiny Cocktails section, where a Manhattan, a Martinez or a Dry Martini is £8, or £22 for all three.
It runs to midnight most nights and 12.30am on Saturdays, and only a limited number of tables can be reserved, because walk-ins are always accommodated. That is the point. Eat downstairs in the brasserie first, where two courses are £16.95.
The room is the real draw and it has a proper history. This was Dick’s Bar, the 1930s cocktail room Oliver Bernard designed inside the Regent Palace Hotel, which opened in 1915 as the largest hotel in Europe with 1,028 bedrooms. Historic England, listing the interiors Grade II in 2004, called this the finest single space in the building: ribbed glass columns, a coved ceiling with the lighting built into it, and broad horizontal stripes of stained birch. The hotel above was demolished and the listed rooms were taken apart and reinstalled piece by piece. Brasserie Zédel and the bar opened in 2012, and it belongs to the Wolseley Hospitality Group now rather than Corbin & King.
The Paul Colin lithographs are worth ten minutes on their own. Le Tumulte Noir is a portfolio of forty-five hand-coloured prints, an homage to Josephine Baker, who was Colin’s muse and who wrote the foreword. It was published in January 1927 and the original edition sold out inside a day. Bar Américain holds one of the few complete sets. Panos Ntalianis runs the bar.
More around it in our guide to the best bars in Soho.
Swift, Soho
12 Old Compton Street, W1D 4TQ · email rather than phone to book
The upstairs-downstairs trick done better than anywhere else in London: a bright ground-floor room for one aperitivo before dinner, and a dark basement underneath for the serious drinking afterwards. You can use it two entirely different ways on the same night.
The Irish coffee is the house order and has been since it opened. Go upstairs at six, downstairs at ten.
There are four sites now, in Soho, Shoreditch, Borough and London Bridge, and Soho is still the best of them. One practical quirk: they do not take reservation calls, so email rather than ring. Our full Swift Bar review has more.
It is the work of Bobby Hiddleston and Mia Johansson, who between them had already fixed most of what was wrong with drinking in Soho before they opened their own place. The ground floor is walk-in only, which is the bit worth knowing.
Bar Termini
7 Old Compton Street, W1D 5JE · bookable via Tock · opens 10am
Twenty-odd seats, a marble counter and the best Negroni in Soho, in a room that genuinely operates as an Italian caffè from ten in the morning. That opening time is the detail nobody uses: you can have an espresso here at eleven and a Negroni at eleven-oh-five, and both will be excellent.
The Negroni comes pre-batched and bottled, aged, in three versions. Order the classic first and work sideways. There is also a short list of tramezzini if you need something solid.
It is tiny, so book. Open to 1am Friday and Saturday.
Tony Conigliaro is behind it, which explains why a room this small is this precise. The menu is deliberately short, and the twenty-five seats mean the whole place runs like a counter rather than a bar.
Experimental Cocktail Club, Chinatown
13a Gerrard Street, W1D 5PS · relaunched October 2025
The bar that taught London the unmarked-door trick has been completely rebuilt. It closed for the summer of 2025 and reopened on 3 October, redesigned by Dorothée Meilichzon, and it now pitches itself as much as a listening room as a cocktail bar.
General manager Timothy Falzon’s signature is the Turmeric is the New Black, with turmeric vodka, chamomile and champagne. The late-night sandwiches are by Jackson Boxer, and the French onion soup croque is the one to have at midnight.
It sits above a Chinatown shopfront with no sign, which our Chinatown guide covers.
It has been here since 2010, the London sibling of the Paris original, opened by Olivier Bon, Pierre-Charles Cros and Romée de Goriainoff. Dorothy Meilichzon’s refit takes the dragon as its organising motif, with scale-like patterns woven into the carpets and upholstery, a 1960s screen panel, bamboo and antiqued mirrors in purple, brown and deep violet. You go up a steep staircase to the first floor, overlooking Gerrard Street. The cheese is Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Disrepute, Soho
4 Kingly Court, W1B 5PW · members’ bar, reservations required · 21+
Read the second line before you plan your night: Disrepute is a members’ bar and it wants a reservation. Membership is open to anyone who applies, but turning up on spec at half nine on a Friday will not work.
What you get for the faff is the most convincingly glamorous basement in Soho, all low banquettes and brass, with a genuinely inventive list rather than a heritage one. Aperitivo hour runs 4pm to 6pm Sunday to Thursday and is the cheap way in.
Open until 3am Monday to Saturday, dressy rather than smart-casual. Our Disrepute review has the detail.
The name is a joke about the address rather than the bar: this was the setting for the Profumo affair in the sixties. The room reads as 1930s railway carriage crossed with underground speakeasy, and if you only have time for one bar in Soho we would still send you here.
The Thin White Duke
22b Great Windmill Street, W1D 7LD · bookable
A cocktail bar with recording studios attached, which is a stranger and better idea than it sounds. Members use the music production suites upstairs; everyone else drinks downstairs in a room that feels like a private club without behaving like one.
The current list is the Kansai Yamamoto List, twelve drinks by Dav Eames, and the kitchen, Mai, does dim sum until late. Get the dumplings.
Open to midnight most nights, 1pm on Saturdays. Great Windmill Street is thirty seconds from Piccadilly Circus and nobody ever looks down it.
It is a Bowie bar, which the name gives away and the rooms confirm: it pays homage to Berlin and Tokyo, and there is a stained glass window of the man himself that is worth the trip on its own.
The Little Scarlet Door
12–13 Greek Street, W1D 4DL · bookable · to 3am Friday and Saturday
Two floors done up as somebody’s slightly chaotic flat, with sharing cocktails served in vessels that should be embarrassing and somehow are not. It is the best group bar in Soho and it knows exactly what it is.
Go for the sharing serves rather than the singles, and go with four people minimum. Thursday to Saturday it runs to two or three in the morning.
Part of Little Door & Co, which also has Fulham, Shoreditch, Clapham and Notting Hill siblings. Book, because Greek Street on a Saturday is not a walk-in proposition.
There are DJs and dancing from Wednesday through to Saturday, so pick your night according to whether you want to talk. If you like your drinks sweet, the Crimes of Passion is the one.
Three Sheets, Soho
13 Manette Street, W1D 4AP · opened spring 2024
The most consequential London bar opening of 2024, and still underrated. Max and Noel Venning brought the stripped-back, technique-obsessed approach from the Dalston original into a Soho side street, and the result is a room with nothing on the walls and everything in the glass.
The carbonated French 75 is the one to order, then the Mango Ice Tea with rum, pickled mango and Lapsang. The list is short on purpose.
Manette Street is the alley beside Foyles, which means you can be here two minutes after a book and forty minutes before a table anywhere else.
The thing nobody expects of a bar this serious is that it trades all day, every day: coffee and pastries in the morning, lunch, aperitivo, dinner and nightcaps, with no closed day and no evening-only rule. The room is a Calacatta marble centrepiece bar, dark green curved banquettes and an original skylight with tables beneath it, and the whole facade retracts in summer onto the pedestrianised street. The Vennings opened Three Sheets Dalston in 2016 and it has made the World’s 50 Best list five times. William Blank, ex-Lyle’s, runs the kitchen.
More on the same few streets in our guide to Soho bars.
El Siete
Beneath El Pastor, Brewer Street, Soho · opened February 2026 · £7 cocktail hour 5–7pm
Harts Group rebuilt the bar under El Pastor in February and gave it a structure you can actually navigate: seven margaritas, seven agave cocktails, seven updated classics. Nothing else.
The 777 Margarita arrives in a stainless steel flask, poured ice-cold in three goes, and it is the reason to come. There is a £7 cocktail hour every day from five to seven, which in Soho in 2026 is close to charity.
Open to 1am. Eat upstairs afterwards; our El Pastor review covers that side.
Sixty seats around a central horseshoe bar topped in terrazzo and clad in volcanic stone, designed by Macaulay Sinclair with a pink scheme and brutalist nods to Mexico City. The entrance is a discreet pink door on Brewer Street with its own staircase. It was the Hix bar before, and the chile de árbol popcorn is a holdover from those days. The list was built by the Soulshakers team, who also run the San Remo bar at Glastonbury.
Kamara
58 Poland Street, W1F 7NR · opened 2025
A Greek bar that is not a Greek restaurant with a cocktail list, which is the distinction that makes it worth the trip. The drinks are built on spirits aged in-house, macerations and ferments, and the mezze is there to keep you upright rather than to be the point.
Ask what has come out of the barrels recently and order that. It is the most genuinely distinctive new bar in Soho and the least shouted about.
Eighty-three seats in a cave-like vaulted room above the new Brother Marcus Soho, in the site that was Jason Atherton’s Blind Pig. Tasos Gaitanos and Alex Large, who opened the first Brother Marcus in 2016, are behind it, with the drinks by Angelos Bafas, previously at Soma, Kioku and Nipperkin. The Cretan pottery is not decoration: the macerations and ageing happen in it. Ask for the Tuvunu Highball, with fig brandy, Metaxa 12, mountain tea and fermented figs.
More nearby in our guide to the best bars in Soho.
Moonrays
7 Denmark Street, WC2H 8LZ · opened 29 August 2026
The newest thing on this list and the one to try first if you like your drinking with a Technics deck in the room. Café upstairs, bar in the middle, and a basement Listening Room that opened with My Analog Journal on the decks.
It is the London debut of the Turkish hotel group Akra, and it has taken the old Dram Bar site.
Denmark Street is still the guitar shop street, which makes a hi-fi bar on it either perfect or too neat, depending on your mood.
The best thing about it is the address. Seven Denmark Street has been in the music business since 1911: David Bowie got some of his earliest professional representation from an office in this house, and the Sex Pistols were headquartered in the building. Three floors, two bars and a ground-floor terrace, with the Listening Room in the basement.
More around Denmark Street and Seven Dials in our Covent Garden bars guide.
Hidden Society
61 Goodge Street, W1T · opened 9 April 2026
Nightcap’s attempt at a calmer room than the Cocktail Club chain it also owns, in the site that was Cocktail Club Goodge Street. The menu is by Lorenzo Gavelli, who runs Disrepute, and it is considerably better than the group’s reputation suggests.
There is a concealed area built into the room, which is the gimmick, and a late licence that Westminster granted in April over residents’ objections, which is the reason it is still going at one in the morning.
Fitzrovia has needed a proper late bar for years. This is it.
It takes a hundred across the room, with a semi-exclusive area for thirty that you book separately, and it is Nightcap plc, Sarah Willingham’s group, which also owns Disrepute, Blame Gloria and Dirty Martini. Three pieces of small print worth having: it is over-eighteens only, table service starts at 8pm, and Sundays are private hire only.
More rooms still serving at one in the morning in our guide to late-night bars in London.
Cato
17 Mercer Street, Seven Dials, WC2H 9QJ · opened February 2026 · closed Sundays
Three rooms named for Cato Alexander, who was born enslaved in New York around 1780, served George Washington in the inn where he worked, bought his freedom in 1799 and became America’s first celebrity bartender, which is a far better conceit than another prohibition pastiche. The ground floor is the House of Julep, the basement is Cato proper, and Cato’s Study is for private hire.
Have a Mint Julep downstairs at the House of Julep, because that is the whole argument of the place, then the Old Fashioned with brown butter and chestnut in the basement.
Open 3pm to 1am Wednesday to Saturday, midnight Monday and Tuesday. Book.
It is run by Bart & Taylor, the group founded by Aistė Bart and Andy Taylor, with Angelos Bafas on the drinks, which is why it tastes like a cousin of Kamara. The Cato Mint Julep is £15, arrives in a frosted metal cup and uses mint grown on site. The quiet flex is the sourcing: every spirit and ingredient on the list comes from the UK. Look up at the dot paintings by Noj Barker while you wait.
More in the same few streets in our Covent Garden bars guide.
Mr Fogg’s Botanical Tavern & Treehouse
48 Newman Street, W1T 1QQ · some tables held for walk-ins
Formerly House of Botanicals, and Inception Group’s branding has drifted, so search both names. What has not changed is the first-floor Treehouse, up a spiral staircase, with a wisteria ceiling and about twenty seats.
Ask for the Treehouse when you book or you will end up in the perfectly nice but much less interesting room downstairs. The botanical brunch is £48 a head for ninety minutes of bottomless Bellinis.
They always keep a few tables back for walk-ins, which is worth knowing at seven on a Thursday.
The conceit across the whole group is a fictional Victorian explorer, and the rooms are stuffed accordingly: taxidermy, tandems, flags, hunting trophies. Mr Fogg’s Residence in Mayfair is the fullest expression of it if you want the maximalist version.
More of this sort of thing in our guide to themed bars in London.
Covent Garden, Mayfair and St James’s
The cocktail bar upstairs at Rules
35 Maiden Lane, WC2E 7LB · above London’s oldest restaurant
Up the stairs at Rules, which has been serving since 1798, is a small bar fitted out with panelling and bar fittings salvaged from the Savoy. The house rules are the appeal: no music, no beer, and no infusions. Spirits, ice and stirring.
Order a Martini and watch it made properly by somebody who does not want to talk to you about botanicals. It is the most grown-up drink in Covent Garden.
One flag: Rules is currently foregrounding a cocktail space it calls The Winter Gardens, so the room may have been renamed since we were last in. Ask at the door. Our Upstairs at Rules review has the rest.
There is also a winter terrace now, which is the most over-the-top thing Rules has ever done and completely at odds with the austerity of the bar itself. Ask for it in cold weather.
Oriole
7–9 Slingsby Place, WC2E 9AB · moved from Smithfield in October 2024
Oriole spent its first years in a transformed pub cellar under Smithfield Meat Market. When Smithfield was redeveloped it moved to The Yards off Covent Garden, reopening in October 2024 as a full bar-restaurant rather than the pure cocktail den it was.
The list is still built around the old-world, new-world and the Orient structure, which means you can order something genuinely unfamiliar and trust it. Go for the New World section.
Slingsby Place is a courtyard most people walk past on the way to Seven Dials, which is to your advantage.
The live music programming is the thing the new site has kept, and it is better than most bars manage: a proper roster rather than a man with a saxophone in the corner.
Red Room at the Connaught
Carlos Place, W1K 2AL · no reservations, walk-in only
The most surprising door policy in Mayfair: the Connaught’s Red Room does not take bookings at all. Turn up, and if there is space you are in, which makes one of London’s best hotel bars far more accessible than its address suggests.
The current concept is Framing the Vine, where every cocktail is built on wine as the base ingredient, keyed to the sculptural divider in the room. Wines come by Coravin from the Connaught cellars. The Martini here is also, still, among the best in London.
Open from 4pm, to 1am Tuesday to Saturday. Go at four.
The art is the reason to go even if you do not drink. Louise Bourgeois’ I Am Rouge, a red pencil and gouache work, was shown publicly here for the first time, alongside a scarlet Bourgeois hologram from 1998, with glass panels by Brian Clarke framing them and work by Jenny Holzer, Trina McKillen and Tia-Thuy Nguyen around the room. Bryan O’Sullivan Studio did the scheme, including the Gaudí-inspired plaster divider, in what was an adjoining jewellery shop until 2022. The hotel publishes no prices; The Infatuation puts signatures from around £24. There is no published dress code either, which for Mayfair is worth saying out loud.
More of the same standard in our guide to the best hotel bars in London.
St James Bar at the Sofitel
6 Waterloo Place, SW1Y 4AN · bookable · daily to midnight
A proper hotel bar two minutes from Trafalgar Square, with a mural, a mezzanine and none of the self-consciousness of the Mayfair equivalents. It is the answer to where to drink before or after the theatre.
The current menu, La Nuit Parfaite, is structured as a French evening in five acts, from L’Apéro Hour through to Le French Exit, which is a considerably better piece of menu design than most. Work through it in order if you have three hours.
Our St James Bar review has more, and it is in our round-up of the most beautiful places in London for good reason.
Hotel bars are usually where atmosphere goes to die, all laptops and standard-issue cocktails. This is the antithesis of that, and it is the reason we keep sending people to a Sofitel.
The Nest at Treehouse Hotel
14–15 Langham Place, W1B 2QS · 21+ after 5pm · bookable
Worth being precise about, because there were two Nests and one is gone. The Dalston club of that name closed and its basement is now Parasol. This is the rooftop at the Treehouse on Langham Place, and it is open.
It runs from noon to 1am, with DJs Thursday to Saturday from eight and a strict 21-and-over policy after five. There is also a pet-friendly Sunday slot from noon called Drinks on the Woof, which is exactly as advertised.
The view down Regent Street is the draw. Groups of six or more have to call rather than book online.
The terrace runs 360 degrees around the roof and is laid out with benches and loungers rather than high tables, which makes it one of the few rooftops in London you can actually settle into.
Laki Kane Oxford Street
31 Duke Street, W1U 1LG · relaunched March 2026 · 3am licence
The Islington original closed on 1 September 2025 and the brand came back in March at the old Burlock Rum Room site off Oxford Street, with a 3am licence and a dancefloor. It is more club than the old room was, deliberately.
The rum-making workshops and cocktail masterclasses have survived the move, and they are the best thing about it: you blend your own and take the bottle home.
Open Thursday to Sunday only.
Georgi Radev, formerly creative manager at Mahiki Global, founded the brand and the workshops come out of his book, Let’s Get Tropical. The Islington original ran for seven years before closing, and the relaunch marked itself by giving away five thousand free cocktails. The site was the Burlock rum bar before, and it is in partnership with The Breakfast Group.
South Bank and London Bridge
Lyaness
20 Upper Ground, SE1 9PD · cocktails £11–£19 · booking recommended
Ryan Chetiyawardana’s riverside room is still the most intellectually ambitious bar in London, and the Collaboration 2.0 list is the most approachable it has been in years. Drinks run £11 to £19, with a Special Editions list from £24 to £31 for anyone feeling reckless.
Order the Pink Belly Gimlet at £17. If you want to understand what the kitchen behind the bar is doing, ask which house ingredient the list is built on and order whatever they say.
Open from 5pm, 1pm at weekends, to 1am Friday and Saturday. Walk-ins subject to space.
Collaboration 2.0 landed in May 2026 with eleven new drinks and seven reworked classics, and the Cherry Cannon Punch, with Hibiki Harmony, straw-currant, pine and sakura tea, is £19. The bar claims to be the first three-PIN bar in The Pinnacle Guide. Two bits of small print: it is over-eighteens from 5pm, and the weekend Champagne Lunch runs 1pm to 4pm with glasses at £10, which is the cheapest way into the room.
Our full Lyaness review goes into the menu properly.
12th Knot
20 Upper Ground, SE1 9PD · terrace is first-come, first-served and shuts at 10pm
Directly above Lyaness in the same building, and the single most useful thing to know is that the terrace closes at ten on licensing grounds. Arrive at nine and you get twenty minutes.
Go at five instead, when the terrace is empty and the light is on the river, and stay inside afterwards. Tables inside are bookable for up to fifteen.
The Friday quirk is Martini and Fries, 5pm to 7pm, with bottomless curly fries, which is a considerably better idea than it has any right to be. Our 12th Knot review has the rest, and there are more in our rooftop bars guide.
It used to be the Rumpus Room, so if you visited a decade ago and remember the view, this is the same terrace with a better bar attached.
Nine Lives
8 Holyrood Street, SE1 2EL · booking only, maximum 20 · closed Sunday and Monday
A basement neighbourhood bar behind London Bridge that takes sustainability seriously without making you read about it, and which has one of the most serious sound systems in any London bar: a custom quadraphonic rig by Wave Research.
It is booking-only with time limits, ninety minutes for up to four people and two hours for five to twelve, so plan rather than drift. The tacos, by a chef billed as El Tigre, are genuinely good.
Dogs welcome but out by nine Thursday to Saturday. Our Nine Lives review has more.
They also built an outdoor drinking street alongside it, and covered it for winter, which makes this one of the few London Bridge bars you can sit outside at in February.
Nancy’s
4th floor, Colechurch House, London Bridge Walk, SE1 2SX · opened June 2026 · walk-ins welcome
The most fun new bar in London, on the fourth floor of a Brutalist office block above an Evans Cycles, with disco balls, tiger-print pool tables and a skyline view nobody charges you for.
The move is the tableside Negroni trolley: six variants including smoky and chocolate, rolled to your table. Small Sips start at £6, which is not a misprint. The Queen’s Walk, with whisky, blueberry, cinnamon and custard soft serve, is the silly one and it works.
Open to 2am Thursday to Saturday, when it becomes a dancefloor. Walk-ins genuinely welcome, which at London Bridge is rare.
Colechurch House is worth knowing about before you go up: a late-1960s Brutalist office block by E. G. Chandler, whose waffled facade is the reason the bar has those absurdly wide windows. Southwark granted permission to demolish it in September 2022, to be replaced by a twenty-two-storey Foster + Partners building with a new Southwark Playhouse inside, so this is a bar trading in a condemned building. The name is for Peter de Colechurch, who built London Bridge in 1209. Max Wolff and Martha May Markham both came from Swift. The Miloco, with coconut caramel, mango and passion fruit, is £16.
More around it in our guide to London Bridge bars.
East London
Waltz
28 Scrutton Street, EC2A 4RP · no reservations · Tuesday to Saturday
The best bar in London, and the one to go to first. Gento Torigata ran Kwant before opening this narrow Shoreditch room, and the bartending is Tokyo-precise in a way nothing else in the city quite matches. It came in at number 23 in Europe’s 50 Best Bars 2026 and took the Best New Opening award the same year.
Order the Sesame Alexander, with Nikka gin, black sesame and cacao liqueur, which is the drink people cross London for. The indigo ceiling mural is worth looking up at.
The counter is walk-in only and there are a handful of bookable tables, but read the small print: the full cocktail list is served to the twelve people at the counter and nowhere else. Sit on the floor and you get highballs, aperitifs and a short waiting menu. Go at opening on a Tuesday.
The counter itself is eight metres of elm, milled from a tree that came down in Gibson Square in Angel and polished to a mirror. The Sesame Alexander is £19. The In Season half of the list is built on Japan’s seventy-two micro-seasons, five-day windows with names like the first peach blossom, so it moves constantly. There are twelve sakes by the glass and a floor menu of wasabi peas, pickles and ochazuke to eat while you wait. The name comes from the Bill Evans album Waltz for Debby.
More on the same streets in our guide to the best bars in Shoreditch.
Nightjar, Shoreditch
129 City Road, EC1V 1JB · booking required · 21+, no sportswear, seated only
Live music every single night from nine, with a cover charge that goes directly to the musicians, which is the detail that separates it from every other speakeasy in London. Sixty-five seats, cashless, no standing.
Booking is required and opens ninety days ahead. Be aware they take card authentication and charge £10 a head if you cancel after 1pm on the day, and the table is held for fifteen minutes.
Order from the Prohibition section and let them steer you. Shoreditch is the only Nightjar now. Our Nightjar review has more, and there are more rooms like it in our jazz clubs guide.
Finding it is part of it: an unmarked wooden door on City Road, then down into exposed brick and a decorated wood ceiling. Easy enough sober, less so on the way back.
Callooh Callay
65 Rivington Street, EC2A · bookable · to 3am Thursday to Sunday
Fifteen years on and still the most playful bar in Shoreditch. The current menu is the Calloohpoly, following a run of formats that have included cassette tapes and comic books, and the hidden room at the back is now the JubJub Bar.
The point is that the silliness is a delivery mechanism for genuinely good drinks rather than a substitute for them. Ask to be put in the back room when you book.
Open from six, to three in the morning Thursday to Sunday. Our Callooh Callay review goes into the wardrobe door and the rest of it.
The front bar is perfectly good and most people stop there. The back bar is the one worth the effort, and you may well need a reservation for it.
Happiness Forgets
8–9 Hoxton Square, N1 6NU · book via Dishcult · from 5pm daily
A low-ceilinged basement on Hoxton Square that has been quietly excellent for well over a decade, working to the house line: great cocktails, no wallies. It is dark, it is small, and the drinks are very precisely made.
Go early. It has about forty seats and the five-to-seven window is the only time you will walk in.
Bookings have moved to Dishcult, so an old link will not work. They have also opened a sister bar, No Nuisance, in St Albans. Our Happiness Forgets review has the detail.
Get your elbows out or your booking finger ready, because for a bar that trades on being hard to find it is one of the hottest tables in east London and has been for years.
Seed Library
100 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JQ · cocktails £15–£25 · walk-ins always attempted
Mr Lyan’s basement under One Hundred Shoreditch, and the most comfortable serious bar in east London. The list rotates constantly and runs £15 to £25, with the South Island Sour at £15 and the Koji Hardshake at £25. Non-alcoholic drinks are £8 to £9 and are treated as actual cocktails.
The Diggers Dozen vinyl sets on Friday and Saturday are the reason to come at the weekend rather than midweek.
Closed Monday and Tuesday. They always try to fit walk-ins in, and online bookings go up to fifteen. Our Seed Library review has more.
Ryan Chetiyawardana has been one of the most inventive people in the industry for over a decade, and this is the most relaxed room he has built. You do not need to know any of that to enjoy it.
Coupette
423 Bethnal Green Road, E2 0AN · live piano Monday and Wednesday, 8–11pm
A French bar in Bethnal Green built around Calvados and Champagne, and the Champagne Piña Colada is still the drink people come for. The room is all dark green tile and low light and it is considerably more elegant than its stretch of road.
The move is Monday or Wednesday, when there is live piano from eight to eleven and specially priced cocktails to go with it. Most people come on a Saturday, which is the wrong night.
Open to 1am Friday and Saturday. Our Coupette review has the story behind it.
Step through the blue door and you are in a Parisian bar rather than a Bethnal Green one. It has been turning up on world’s-best lists since it opened in 2017 and has never traded on it.
Victorian Bath House
7–8 Bishopsgate Churchyard, EC2M 3TJ · Thursday to Saturday only · no walk-ins
An 1895 Turkish bath house down a flight of steps in a City churchyard, tiled floor to ceiling, and one of the genuinely extraordinary rooms in London. Read the small print though: it trades as a public bar only Thursday to Saturday, 5pm to midnight, and every other day it is private hire.
You cannot walk in. You have to enquire in advance, and that catches out almost everyone who reads about it.
The house-infused gins are the thing, and they get properly strange: quince and blue cheese, venison and summer truffle. The champagne cooler is an old bathtub.
Henry and James Forder Nevill built it in 1895, to G. Harold Elphick’s design, on the site of baths that went back to 1817, and it opened on 5 February that year. What survives at street level is the Moorish kiosk with its onion cupola; the winding staircase down is lined in tin-glazed faience and the tiles are Craven Dunnill. Downstairs there were once three heated chambers and a thirty-foot cold plunge. It ran until 1954, when the Nevills chose not to renew the lease, and reopened as a bar in 2016 under Camm & Hooper. It takes up to 150.
More rooms you have to know about first in our guide to secret bars in London.
Parasol
36 Stoke Newington Road, N16 7XJ · closed Sunday to Tuesday
Built in the basement that was The Nest, by Andy Kerr of Discount Suit Company with Tom Gibson, and it has managed the hard trick of making a big subterranean room feel intimate.
Order the June Bug, with overproof rum, yellow Chartreuse, pineapple, banana, melon and coconut, which is a tiki drink made by people who can actually make tiki drinks. Or the Korean Jesus, with tequila, mezcal, plum soju and gochujang.
Guest DJs play 1980s New York mutant disco and it runs late. This is the best new bar in Dalston and the strongest argument that the area has got its nerve back.
It holds around 150 and Andy Kerr runs it with Tom Gibson, who is also behind Ruby’s and Corrochio’s, so there is a family resemblance to CINCO a few doors up. The other two to order are the Kinder Bueno, with whiskey, Irish cream and hazelnut, and Death By Snu Snu, with gin, génépi, pear and rhubarb. The music policy is oddly specific and much better than it sounds: 1980s New York mutant disco. Note the days. It opens Wednesday to Saturday and nothing else.
More along the same road in our guide to Stoke Newington bars.
CINCO
76 Stoke Newington Road, N16 7XB · Wednesday to Saturday only
A basement mezcal den under Corrochio’s, with the menu presented as an embroidered passport in three sections of five drinks: agave, other Mexican spirits, and alcohol-free treated with the same seriousness.
The Padresito, with mezcal and house ginger and honey liqueur, is the one. The pear and apple tepache with calvados arrives in an oversized tankard.
Book through Corrochio’s upstairs. Fifteen drinks, no filler, and an agave list to rival anywhere in the city.
Thirty people fit in it. The entrance is the giveaway that nobody is trying to be found: an anonymous staircase beside Corrochio’s with a cinema marquee sign over it, and this basement is where Corrochio’s itself started before the restaurant moved upstairs. Daniel Corrochio, from Guadalajara, and Amy McQuarrie sourced the mezcals themselves on trips through Mexico. There is an exclusive Pechuga de Piña from Oaxaca poured until the bottles run out, and then it is gone for good.
More on this stretch in our guide to bars in Stoke Newington.
Ellie’s
428 Kingsland Road, E8 4AA · opened 2025 · £8 Martini
The price is the entire point. Ellie’s opened in Dalston doing a properly made Martini for £8 at a moment when every other new bar in London went the other way, and it has been full ever since.
Order the Martini. That is the review. The room is minimal and warm and there is nothing else it is trying to be.
If you want to understand why London drinking still works despite the prices elsewhere on this page, come here first.
The room is custard-yellow with orb pendants and a red banquette running from the door to the bar, the doors fold back onto the pavement in summer and there is Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo. The house drink is the Pamela, with jalapeño vodka, kiwi and coconut, named after the woman who ran the space before. It is walk-in only, Wednesday to Sunday, and to 2am at weekends. Worth checking the Martini price before you build an evening on it.
More around Dalston in our guide to the best bars in Hackney.
Found Shoreditch
5 Ravey Street, EC2A 4QW · bookable
A basement beside Casita with a deliberately short list: twelve cocktails, four small rooms, and no interest in expanding either. Oskar Klimaszewski owns it and the opening list was built by Ben Todd, who worked the old Casita site next door.
Twelve drinks means every one has been thought about, so order the thing you would not normally choose. The small rooms make it one of the better dates in Shoreditch.
Open from five most nights, 1am Friday and Saturday, 10.30pm on Sunday.
You will not stumble on it. It is down a narrow flight of stairs and it is small, and the short list changes seasonally, with each drink good enough to stop the conversation for a second.
Heaven and Hell, with cachaça, framboise, jalapeño agave, lime and raspberry, is the one they put their name to. Four rooms, exposed brick, wall plants and low-lit nooks behind a doorway you would walk past.
The Last Tuesday Society
11 Mare Street, E8 4RP · absinthe parlour free to enter · museum £12
Viktor Wynd’s absinthe parlour, sitting above a cabinet of curiosities that contains, among other things, things we are not going to describe here. The bar and the galleries are free; the Wunderkabinett itself is £12, or £8 if you have a bar reservation.
Have an absinthe, served properly with the spoon and the water, and then go downstairs. Museum visits are capped at thirty minutes and it is £4 walk-in on Thursdays.
Open Tuesday to Sunday, to midnight Friday and Saturday. Reservations strongly encouraged for the parlour. It is the strangest drink on this list and it earns its place in our quirky things to do guide.
The room itself is a neon-clad, UV-dripping dive of such spectacular commitment that it loops back round into charm. There is nothing else like it in London.
Old Street Records
350–356 Old Street, EC1V 9NQ · live music seven nights
Less a cocktail bar than a late room with live music and bottled beer only, no draught, which is a choice. It stays open to two most weekends and it is the answer when everything else on Old Street has stopped serving.
Come for the last hour rather than the first. Two steps at the entrance with no handrail, which is worth knowing.
There is live music every night of the week, school nights included, which is the actual reason to come. A chilled-out space upstairs, a cosy basement below, both under ambient red lighting.
Over three hundred capacity across two floors, designed by Blacksheep, with a copper bar, diamond-stitched leather booths and a back bar stacked with vinyl from Fiction Records and Caroline International. The downstairs lighting strips are synced to the music. Rocket Leisure run it, along with Venn Street Records and Northcote Records. Two offers make it cheap on purpose: two-for-one cocktails every day from 5pm to 8pm, and two drinks with two pizzas for £28 Monday to Wednesday. Midnight Train plays every Wednesday.
Passione Vino
85 Leonard Street, EC2A 4QS and 58 Exmouth Market, EC1R 4QR · bookable
An Italian-only wine specialist that has been going for about twenty years and has added a second site on Exmouth Market. Not a cocktail bar at all, and here because it is simply among the finest places to drink in east London.
There is no wine list at all, which is the point: you say what you like and what you want to spend, and someone brings you something from one of the ninety-five Italian growers they import. The masterclasses are worth booking.
Luca Dusi is a wine importer first and a bar owner second, which is the whole explanation. The Exmouth Market room opened just before Christmas 2025 in what was the Family Business tattoo studio, and there is a conservatory-style private room at the back for groups and tastings that you have to ask for. The Dirupi Olé Rosso is £50 a bottle or £10.50 a glass, and the kitchen is Pascal Lazzarotto’s.
More in our guide to wine bars in London.
South London
The Black Duke at Brunswick House
30 Wandsworth Road, SW8 2LG · opened October 2025 · bookable
Brunswick House has always been worth the trip, a Georgian mansion crammed with architectural salvage and marooned beside the Vauxhall gyratory. What is new, and what should now be the reason you go, is the cocktail bar that opened in its cellar in October 2025.
The Black Duke’s list starts with a One Sip Negroni at £5, which is the best value drink in London and exactly what it sounds like. After that the Brunswick Milk Punch is £14 and the Martini No. 3.5 is £13. There is live jazz down there some nights.
Prices are from their autumn menu so confirm before you plan around them. Book online or ring; the upstairs restaurant is a separate proposition and also good.
More rooms like this in our guide to quirky bars in London.
Palais, Peckham
1a Rye Lane, SE15 5EW · reopened February 2026 · Ballroom free entry
The Night Group reopened a nightclub that had sat dormant for nearly fifteen years, and split it: the cocktail Ballroom upstairs is free to walk into, the basement club below is ticketed and enforces a strict no-phones policy, with a Funktion-One rig.
Order the hay-smoked olive Martini, which is the bestseller, or the Sazerac with banana liqueur. Then decide whether you are going downstairs.
Ballroom from 5pm Wednesday to Saturday. The club serves to six in the morning, which makes this the latest entry on this page by a wide margin.
The building was the Jones & Higgins department store, which opened on the site in 1867 and traded until 1980, and the graffiti on the High Street windows has been deliberately left where it was. Night Group, who run Night Tales and Netil360, took on eleven thousand square feet of it. Two things to expect at the door: stickers go over your phone camera on the way in, and there are lockers rather than a cloakroom. The basement rig is Funktion-One, ten BR118 subs and a BRF132 infra bass, tuned over close to a year.
More nearby in our guide to the best bars in Peckham.
Frank’s Café at Bold Tendencies
Top of the multi-storey car park, Rye Lane, Peckham · seasonal · card only
The best view in south London from a bar, on the roof of a Peckham car park, and it only exists for four months a year. The 2026 season ran from 15 May to 12 September, Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 11pm, so it has just shut for the winter.
It is walk-in only, no table reservations, and card only. Come for sunset in July, drink the Campari and soda, and climb the extra flight to the Bold Tendencies commission while you are up there.
Diarise it for May. Everything else on this list is open now; this one is a date in the calendar.
The structure is not new and never has been. Practice Architecture built it in 2009 as Bold Tendencies’ first architecture commission, Paloma Gormley and Lettice Drake with Henry Stringer, out of reclaimed scaffolding boards and lorry siding, and it is strapped to the roof each summer with twelve fifty-metre ratchet straps that also hold the red canopy up. The pink staircase is Simon Whybray’s, painted in 2016. The Camberwell Arms team run the drinks. 2026 was the twentieth anniversary season, titled Euphoria, and Andreas Gursky’s Cocoon II was shown in the UK for the first time on the floors below.
More for when the weather holds in our guide to outdoor bars in London.
Lost & Found
10 Bedford Hill, Balham, SW12 9RG · bookable
It is on Bedford Hill in Balham, a long way from the centre and worth the trip. Two floors, cocktails on one and karaoke on the other, with a private karaoke room that takes sixteen seated or thirty-five standing.
Book the private room rather than taking your chances on the main floor. The pizzas are by Yard Sale, which raises the bar considerably.
Open to 1am Friday and Saturday.
Two floors got up like somebody’s front room, ditsy floral wallpapers, gilded photo frames and vintage odds and sods. The house drink is the Cloud #9, with gin, chamomile syrup, lemon sherbet and egg white. Open from 5pm, to midnight Sunday to Thursday.
Little Nan’s, Deptford
Deptford Market Yard, SE8 · two sites
Tray-bake cocktails served in teapots and vintage glassware in a room got up like a 1980s front room, and there are now two Deptford sites: the original in Deptford Market Yard and Little Nan’s 2.0, which opened on Resolution Way in 2024 in a space four times the size.
Order something in a teapot and do not overthink it. It is the most purely enjoyable bar in south-east London and it has no interest in being taken seriously.
Tristan Scutt opened it on Valentine’s Day 2013 in the windowless back room of the Bunker Club on Deptford Broadway, in honour of his late grandmother, Little Nan JoJo, and furnished it with her own furniture and china. The teapots are literally hers. It was meant to last three months. There are more than ninety signature cocktails now, and one piece of small print nobody else offers: private hire is free to southeast London residents for parties of sixty-five or more. Hours are posted on social media each Sunday night for the week ahead, so check before you set off.
More nearby in our Deptford guide.
North London
Little Bat
54 Islington Park Street, N1 1PX · closed Mondays · booking recommended
A corner bar off Upper Street that does the neighbourhood thing better than anywhere else in Islington: proper cocktails, no attitude, and an oyster happy hour from five to eight every single day.
That is the order. Oysters and a Martini between five and eight, then decide whether to stay. There is fifty per cent off food on Friday and Saturday afternoons between two and five, and live jazz every second Thursday.
Open to 1am most nights. Walk-ins when there is space, which before seven there usually is.
It comes from the Callooh Callay team, which is the reason the drinks are better than the corner-bar setting suggests, and it has been here since March 2016. The room is long and thin with slouchy sofas at the back and two-seater tables along the wall, so the back is where you want to be.
More of the city’s better drinking in our guide to cocktail bars in London.
Little Mercies
20 Broadway Parade, Crouch End, N8 9DE · closed Monday and Tuesday
The pedigree is the story: Alan Sherwood, formerly of Scout and Peg + Patriot, with Max and Noel Venning of Three Sheets. That is a serious amount of talent pointed at a shopfront in Crouch End, and it shows.
The tequila-infused Peach Tea is the signature and the nitro cold-drip coffee from Alchemy is what to have if you are driving. Weekend opening from noon makes it a genuinely good daytime bar.
Not bookable through the usual channels, so try them directly. Our Little Mercies review has more.
The decor is pared right back and the service is genuinely relaxed, but the reason to come is that the food is as good as the drinks, which is rarer in a cocktail bar than it should be.
Homeboy
108 Essex Road, N1 8LX · booking recommended at weekends
Irish whiskey-led, draught Guinness on the bar, and one of the warmest rooms in north London. The cocktails are genuinely inventive without being fussy about it, and the kitchen runs until ten.
Order something built on Irish whiskey, which is what they are actually good at, rather than defaulting to a gin drink.
DJs at weekends, open to 1am Friday and Saturday.
Aaron Wall and Ciarán Smith opened it on 6 December 2018, in what had been a London Cocktail Club site where Wall used to work, and Aaron’s father, a master builder, did the fit-out. Between them the CVs run through Callooh Callay, The Dorchester and the Waldorf Astoria New York. Order the Teaandabiccie, with Roe & Co, Bénédictine, Barry’s tea, clarified milk and Hobnob syrup. It was eleventh on the UK Top 50 in 2020 and fourteenth in 2022. It shows international rugby and major football tournaments, so it is not the quiet option on those nights.
More in our guide to whisky bars in London.
Hoxley & Porter
153 Upper Street, N1 1RA · late Thursday to Saturday
A Grade II listed building with 1631 coaching-inn origins, rebuilt in 1879, which has been Murrays and then Grand Union and is now a gin-led bar that stays open to two or three at weekends.
Keg beer only, no cask, so come for the gin. The room is the reason: it is far more handsome than most of Upper Street.
It is the answer to where to go after eleven in Islington, which is a genuinely short list.
Costa Tofan opened it in 2013 and split it in two: Hoxley is the dining side, fitted out like a train carriage with staff in striped waistcoats, and Porter is the bar, named after a diamond. The Smokey Bob is £13 and the Ultimate Old Fashioned the same. Ask for Whatever Doesn’t Kill You if you want the absinthe-coated scorpion garnish. The booths have names and capacities and you have to request them: Baby Scorpio takes eight, Mother Scorpio ten with food, the Bar Parlor twelve. Closed Sundays.
More in our guide to the best gin bars in London.
Clerkenwell & Social
2–5 St John’s Square, EC1M 4DE · walk-in
A former Whitbread pub on the edge of Farringdon, renamed in 2015, doing cocktails and pizza around St John’s Square, with a keg wall that includes Meantime.
It is not the most inventive bar on this page and it does not pretend to be. What it is, is somewhere you can get a table on a Friday in EC1, which is worth a great deal.
Steps at the entrance and no accessible loo. More in our Farringdon and Clerkenwell guide.
The capacities are worth knowing because they are the point: twenty seated or a hundred standing on the ground floor, forty-five seated or a hundred and twenty upstairs, two hundred and fifty standing in total. It opens Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 11pm, and Sundays and Mondays are private hire only, so do not turn up at the start of the week. Pizzas are £9 to £12.50 and they run cocktail masterclasses.
West London
Trailer Happiness
177 Portobello Road, W11 2DY · bookable · DJs every weekend
Twenty-odd years of tiki in a Portobello Road basement, and still the most fun room in west London. Rum-led, deliberately kitsch, and rescued from being a theme bar by the fact that the drinks are properly made.
Order a Zombie and accept the consequences. DJs play every weekend and it runs to one on Fridays and Saturdays.
Book through trailerh.com. The upstairs restaurant, Portobello 177, does Caribbean and Japanese barbecue.
Sly Augustin took it over around 2012 to stop it closing, having opened in 2003 under Jonathan Downey of the Match bars group. The room is a committed piece of mid-century kitsch: cork tiles, shag pile, flying ducks on the wall and J. H. Lynch and Tretchikoff prints, with a Polynesian statue called Bianca at the top of the stairs before you go down. It is closed on Tuesdays, which catches people out.
Our full Trailer Happiness review has more on the rum list.
Gin Tonica at The Distillery
186 Portobello Road, W11 1LA · walk-in only, no bookings
The first floor of a four-storey gin distillery on Portobello Road, doing Spanish-style G&Ts in copa glasses, with tapas. It does not take bookings, which makes it one of the easiest good drinks in west London.
Order a G&T and let them pick the gin and the garnish, which is the whole point of the format. Open from noon Tuesday to Sunday and to 1am most nights.
The Ginstitute experience upstairs, where you blend your own bottle, is separately bookable and worth doing once.
The gins run from Alicante to Brooklyn to Hamburg to Camden, and the room is the airy, art deco-ish, Spanish-leaning one with single-pane windows over Portobello Road and an open kitchen. The rest of the building is the reason to make a day of it: the Resting Room cocktail bar, the Portobello Road Gin still, the Ginstitute museum and three en-suite bedrooms on the top floor. The Ginstitute itself is £120 for three hours and you leave with a 70cl bottle of your own blend and the recipe kept on file for reorders. There is no food on that one, so eat first.
More around Portobello in our guide to Notting Hill bars.
Caia
46 Golborne Road, W10 5PR · Notti Hour 5.30–6.30pm, £8 cocktails
An open-fire kitchen with a vinyl programme and a genuinely good cocktail list, on the quieter end of the Golborne Road, and the best-value serious drink in west London.
Notti Hour runs Tuesday to Saturday from half five to half six with £8 cocktails and £8 wines, and it is a better drink at that price than most places manage at twice it. Eat while you are there.
Closed Sunday and Monday. Open to 1am Friday and Saturday, bookable via SevenRooms.
It was a Flat Iron before Rishabh Vir and Tim Lang, who ran the Portobello restaurant Fiend, took it on in July 2022, with Beth Brickenden on the wine. The basement is the part people miss: a vinyl collection curated by Noreen McShane of Stranger Than Paradise Records, plus guest DJs, live acoustic sessions and artist Q&As. It is in the Michelin Guide.
More on this side of west London in our Notting Hill bars guide.
Mezcalito
19 Sydney Street, SW3 6NR · closed Mondays
Over 450 tequilas and 100 mezcals, which is not a list you can get through and is not meant to be. It has been on Sydney Street in Chelsea since 2018.
The Margarita Picante and the Mezcal Paloma are the house pours. Ask for a flight if you want to learn something rather than just drink.
Taco Tuesdays, mariachi on Wednesdays and bottomless brunch at weekends, all of which tells you it is more raucous than the address suggests. More in our Mexican restaurants guide.
Laura Geas came to this from an unlikely direction. She ran Souleiado & Les Olivades, a King’s Road showroom selling Provençal fabrics, before opening a mezcaleria, and she now runs it with her son. The cocktail list is arranged around a custom map of Mexico, with drinks named for Jalisco, Nayarit and Michoacán. Happy hour is £8 cocktails Tuesday to Friday, 5pm to 7pm, and Thursday drops that to £6. Closed Mondays, and Sunday finishes early at nine.
Blood Orange Bar
37–39 Pimlico Road, SW1W 8NE · opened 2024
A small, sharp Belgravia room that opened in 2024 and has been quietly one of the better new bars in that half of London ever since.
The Boto Dry Martini, with Ki No Bi gin, vermouth and nori seaweed, is the drink that makes the case. The Queen’s Paloma is the other one to try.
Pimlico Road is a furniture-showroom street that empties at six, which means you will get a seat.
It is in the original 1800s brick vaults beneath The Orange, done in coral and blush with crimson plush seats and draped curtains, and there is a private section called The Vault with lounge seating and screens that you have to book. Read the Cubitt House small print before you go: reservations are required, evening slots run 5.30pm to 11pm, and Mondays and Tuesdays are exclusive bookings only rather than open to walk-ins.
More around Belgravia and Pimlico in our guide to bars in Victoria.
Vagabond Fulham
18–22 Vanston Place, SW6 1AX · bookable · self-pour
The flagship of the self-pour wine bar group, open since 2010, with over a hundred wines available by the glass from tap cards. You walk round and serve yourself in whatever measure you like, which is either liberating or dangerous.
Get a card, take small measures, and taste across a region rather than drinking one bottle. The tapas and flatbreads are there to slow you down.
Worth knowing what happened here: Vagabond went into administration in March 2024 and Majestic bought the business out of it that April, rescuing nine wine bars and 171 jobs. The Canary Wharf site closed in the process. Fulham is the one to go to.
The staff are genuinely happy to walk you through the tap cards rather than leaving you to it, and the bar food and sharing plates are better than the format demands.
More nearby in our guide to the best bars in Fulham.
Amie Wine Studio
13 Eccleston Yards, SW1W 9AZ · courtyard is first-come, first-served
The thing almost nobody tells you about this place: it is not a wine bar with a list. It is a single-brand tasting room pouring amie’s own French wines and nothing else, which is why the flight of five is the only sensible order. Part shop, part rotating art gallery, in the Eccleston Yards courtyard in Belgravia, and open noon to eleven seven days a week, which very little around there is.
Bookings are only taken for groups of six or more, and the courtyard seating is first-come, which means the trick is to arrive at four on a warm afternoon and stay.
Ten per cent of art sales go to charity: water, which is an unusual thing for a wine bar to have organised.
The interior is worth going in for even if the weather is good enough for the courtyard: it is all pink and natural tones, and closer to a gallery than a wine bar.
It started as a WhatsApp message in April 2020. Will and Abbie Sandbach launched the wine first, sold out the original rosé in seven weeks and delivered the orders themselves out of Will’s car, then took a three-month pop-up at Eccleston Yards in June 2022 and never left. They doubled the space in June 2024. The fabrics come from Fermoie a few doors away and most of the furniture is antique-market salvage, which is why it looks nothing like a brand showroom. Dan Herlihy is the artist on the walls at the moment, and their pizzeria, Weezie’s, opened next door in April 2026.
More in our guide to wine bars in London.
How to drink well in London without overpaying
- Happy hours are the single biggest saving. El Siete does £7 cocktails from five to seven daily, Caia does £8 from half five, and the Black Duke’s One Sip Negroni is £5 all the time.
- Check the door policy before you leave the house. Disrepute is members-only, Victorian Bath House needs an advance enquiry and only trades Thursday to Saturday, and Nine Lives is booking-only.
- The best rooms often take no bookings at all. Waltz, Red Room at the Connaught and Gin Tonica are all walk-in, which means going early rather than planning ahead.
- Watch the cancellation terms. Nightjar charges £10 a head if you cancel after 1pm on the day and holds your table for fifteen minutes.
- Terraces close before the bar does. 12th Knot’s shuts at ten on licensing grounds, which catches out most people who book it for a late drink.
- Sunday and Monday are closing days. Seed Library, Caia, Little Mercies, Little Bat, Cato and Nine Lives are all shut on at least one of them.
For more specific nights out, our guides to secret bars in London, rooftop bars, wine bars, activity bars and the newest openings go deeper, and there are neighbourhood lists for Soho, Covent Garden, Mayfair, Camden, London Bridge, Farringdon, King’s Cross, Battersea, Bethnal Green, Canary Wharf and Old Street.
The London x London Take: Two rules will get you into better bars than any list will. First, go early: almost everywhere good takes walk-ins between five and half six and almost nowhere good takes them at nine. Second, if a bar has a happy hour, that is usually the bar being generous rather than desperate, and Caia’s Notti Hour at £8 a cocktail is a better drink than most £19 Martinis in Mayfair. The Black Duke’s £5 One Sip Negroni is the single best value in London drinking.
