The World’s 50 Best Bars, by the Numbers

Last week, the 50 Best organization announced its list of The World’s 50 Best Bars. You probably know the drill by now—and if you haven’t, check out my analysis of last year’s North American and international lists. A quick rundown: To compose the list, the group asks hundreds of experts (a collection of industry folks including bartenders and drinks writers) to anonymously share their “best bar experiences of the previous 18 months.”

I’ve always found this criteria to be a little too vague. I was not asked this question, but if I were, my honest answer wouldn’t be a list of cool bars that I’d necessarily want to broadcast. There’d be an assemblage of just-fine dives and spots conveniently located near my and my friends’ apartments. “Experience” is subjective and tied to so many factors outside of a bar’s control. Writing for Eater’s newsletter Kangtown, Esther Tseng connected the dots this year about why so few Los Angeles bars are recognized, attributing it to the city’s sprawl, compared to places like New York (the only American city represented this year), where you can pretty easily walk between each of the four bars that made the cut. 

Despite the criticisms—of which there have been many—the list is an annual inflection point. What does the industry, on a global scale, value these days? What’s trending among these dialed-in, hospitality-focused spaces? (And cynically, some might ask: Who’s got a good PR team?) We ran the numbers to find out.

Europe has the most bars on the list, with 14 entries. As Pritesh Mody, a UK-based hospitality consultant and the host of the awards ceremony last Wednesday, pointed out, the top three spots this year went to bars on three different continents: Bar Leone in Hong Kong, which returns to the #1 spot; followed by Moebius Milano, in Milan, the same city hosting this year’s event; and Alquímico in Cartagena, Colombia. There are no new countries represented, relative to last year, and there’s a three-way tie between Hong Kong, New York City and Paris for most-awarded city. 

As in the past, there are no African bars on the list, though the ceremony made a point to highlight a “destination award,” created last year, honoring the best bar in the continent. Mody said it was established to “shine a spotlight on an even wider range of bars across the world,” and announced Front/Back in Accra, Ghana as the winner.

About one-quarter of the bars on the list are new (fewer than last year’s returning 40 percent). The Bar in Front of the Bar in Athens won the “highest climber” award, moving up 28 places from last year to take the #19 spot. Other big moves: Bar Benfiddich in Tokyo and Caretaker’s Cottage in Melbourne fell 26 places, while New York City’s Sip & Guzzle rose by 25 places. Generally, movement was less dramatic than last year, which saw one bar fall 37 places.

I was curious how these big moves might coincide with travel trends. The voting body is an international one, but one’s “best experiences” over the past year-and-a-half are obviously affected by where exactly they were. According to Japan Tourism Statistics and the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, travel to both countries declined, year over year. Could Bar Benfiddich and Caretaker’s Cottage’s falls be attributed to, simply, fewer voters going there? (By contrast, in New York, where foreign travel is down, the total number of visitors rose slightly.) It’s impossible, obviously, to tell, but it’s a good reminder that these are extremely subjective rankings.

Anecdotally, people attribute awards buzz to newness. But how much truth is there to that assumption? Thirty bars on the list opened in the 2020s, and six were opened just last year. Bar Carmen and Connaught Bar are the oldest bars on the list, opened in 2008. The newest bars on the list, Victor Audio Bar and Waltz, were opened in May 2025.

We also considered the size of bars’ social media followings. We looked at every bar’s Instagram accounts (barring Connaught Bar and Bar Carmen, who share their accounts with their associated hotel and restaurant respectively), and the average number of followers was around 55,235. This is, of course, a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation; bars that have won awards in the past would of course gain more of a following.

We’ve heard that these awards seem to prioritize bars who retain PR teams. I decided to fact check this: Only about half of the bars that made the list have ever reached out to me, via representative or otherwise, and we’ve covered about a third of the list on Punch. If you’re an ambitious bar doing something cool (especially outside of the United States), please do reach out to me! I’d love to hear from more of you.

Sustainability: If you read the Punch newsletter (subscribe here!), you’ll know that my initial reaction was that while there were nods—like a Sustainable Bar Award, which went to Line in Athens, and shout outs to sustainable bars like De Vie—there isn’t as much of a focus on sustainability this year as in past years. 

I asked the De Vie team if they felt this shift, too. Co-founder Alex Francis says it’s more to do with how bars position themselves, rather than any changes to their actual practices. “The bar world [is] maturing, [rather] than simply pivoting away from sustainability,” he says. While bars and the big awards may spend less air time talking about upcycling ingredients, or using certain ice, he feels that there’s still “a bigger conversation about how bars can reduce their impact on the world,” including community initiatives that go beyond the environment, taking place. 

A flattening of taste? The continued dominance of Bar Leone (#1), a spot that focuses on crowd-pleasing, easy-to-replicate drinks, is a welcome surprise at a time when many of the top spots skew high-tech and high-concept. (I like an extremely engineered cocktail sometimes, but I also want the places keeping it classic to get their flowers.) The win, however, did make me take a closer look at the bar’s local peers. Consider the four Hong Kong bars recognized this year: Bar Leone is an Italian bar; Argo (#25) is a hotel bar in the Four Seasons; Montana (#36) channels Cuba’s golden age; and Gokan (#41) is a Japanese bar. Perhaps these reflect local tastes and trends, not just global ones. But it feels like a lot of the bars, especially outside of the U.S. and Europe, that reach this global stage cater to tourists. In the future, I’d love to see more local flavors and techniques take center-stage. 

Tlecān (#47), a bar spotlighting pre-Hispanic Mexican culture, has always interested me in this way. As Eli Martinez Bello told Punch contributor Ximena N. Beltran Quan Kiu:  “I got into mixology to tell stories. Then I realized, there’s so much that’s already happened, things we can’t forget. So rather than inventing new [stories], I made this about going deep into Mexico’s history and culture, and bringing it to people here and now through drinks.”  

Disclosure: Some Punch contributors are part of the voting body for the 50 Best Bar awards.