London’s bar scene, no longer mysterious slash laughable, is held in highest regard by the world’s bartending fraternity. These essential 15 addresses will bring the most elegant negroni, the most inventive martini, and the friendliest, funnest crowds with which to share them. These are London’s best cocktail bars.
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The 15 Essential London Cocktail Bars
Thirsty? Don’t order a barrel-aged anything until you’ve read this

1. Scout
London E8 1BP, UK
Recently moved from Commercial Street to Hackney, Matt Whiley’s monument to sustainability through cocktails showcases the same sharpness of mind that won his cocktails at Peg and Patriot and The Whistling Shop serious acclaim. Divided into five categories based on the landscape of the British Isles, each category holds three drinks and one snack, available as a flight, if desired. Names are in the Every Cloud school; descriptions more Mr Lyan, but the unifying factor is sustainable creativity.
2. Three Sheets
London E8 4AB, UK
Max and Noel Venning have recently joined a Mayfair supergroup, but their original bar on Kingsland Road is the essential visit. A weekly-changing menu lists nine cocktails, split into threes. Three sheets, specifically. The flagship order is the ‘French 75,’ packing verjus for acidity and moscato for sweetness into a carbonated, batched iteration of the classic cocktail, served tableside from a champagne bottle. Here, it’s more a case of iterating classics than redrawing blueprints, but that doesn’t make the serves any less compelling.
3. 🔶🟥🔵 A Bar with Shapes for a Name
London E2 8AX, UK
When Remy Savage was head bartender at Artesian, one of the best cocktail bars in the city, the menu was a double helix so playful it was practically a toy, and its cocktails were only allowed two ingredients. His new venture with Paul Lougrat and Maria Kontorravdis takes some of this playfulness — it’s a bar called Yellow Triangle, Red Square, Blue Circle, after all — and some of that constraint — 20 bottles turned into 15 - 16 cocktails, all of whose recipes will be put to Instagram for judgement — and alights in Dalston with one of the most compelling offers the city has seen in a very long time.
4. Happiness Forgets
London N1 6NU, UK
‘Alistair Burgess’ Hoxton basement’ might not be the one-liner to tempt a visit, but ‘great cocktails | no wallies’ probably is. A dive bar writ elegant, Happiness Forgets is another in the classics evolved school, but with an enviable flexibility: ask a bartender for a drink based on a favourite spirit or flavour, and what is delivered will be best-in-category, every time.
5. Coupette
London E2 0AN, UK
“Calvados. Cidre. Cocktails,” reads Coupette’s website. And although the first two Cs are definitely well represented (there’s also cheese, charcuterie and beaucoup des croque monsieurs), it’s in the last category that Coupette really shines. The brains behind it is Chris Moore, formerly of The Savoy’s Beaufort Bar, and his know-how really shows — the champagne piña colada has been deservedly lauded, but the truffled white negroni is just as much of an icon in the making. The French theme is stylishly executed: less string of onions, more bar topped with a patchwork of old centimes. Chapeau, Coupette.
6. Tayēr + Elementary
London EC1V 9BW, UK
Two bars in one. Elementary is an all day, walk-in only offering with a simple drinks list and relaxed environment at the front of the space. Tayēr is the experimental bar, more akin to a restaurant — open only in the evenings. Both bars are seasonally influenced and have surprising and fun additions to their drinks. A rhubarb highball is a highlight.
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7. Trailer Happiness
London W11 2DY, UK
Sly Augustin’s iconic Portobello Road rum and cocktail bar has returned from severe flood damage with a vengeance. It’s tiki kitsch but carries it off with aplomb; opens the menu with non-alcoholic drinks as a fine gesture, and still offers one of London’s most extensive, imaginative rum cocktail lists with a sipping range to match.
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8. Mezcaleria
London W1H 7BA, UK
Maxim Schulte’s contribution to Santiago Lastra’s Michelin-starred Mexican debut Kol is a clever cocktail menu which takes a duo of ingredients key to Lastra’s menu and fashions them into two different cocktails from a roster of classic serves. So corn and sea buckthorn are translated into a sea buckthorn French 75 and a corn Old Fashioned, while fig leaf and gooseberry are switched into a short clean batanga based on fig leaf mezcal on the one hand, and a floral mai tai on the other.
9. Swift
Soho, Greater London
Old Compton Street has long been Soho’s naughtiest thoroughfare and, in Swift, it now has two world-class cocktail bars for the price of one. Upstairs is a sleek white space, ideal for an after-work/pre-theatre round of oysters and martinis. Downstairs is a cosy speakeasy-style basement you might slither into for the night. Swift is a joint venture between Bobby Hiddleston & Mia Johannson, who have form at London cocktail institution Callooh Callay and New York’s seminal Dead Rabbit, and Nightjar founders Edmund Weil and Rosie Stimpson. An ideal meeting of minds.
10. Upstairs at Rules
London WC2E 7LB, UK
Rules (opened 1798!) lays claim to be London’s oldest restaurant; consequently its panelled dining rooms are replete with well-heeled tourists busying themselves with the excellent game pie. Less well known is the delightfully old-school bar upstairs, a refuge from Covent Garden and perhaps the most authentically Jeeves-ian cocktail service you’ll find in London: Among the ‘rules’: “No homemade infusions. No assortments of muddled berries. No ‘cocktail speak’. Don’t try to be clever…” Bravo.
11. Bar Américain
London, Greater London
It’s only been open a few years, but the Bar Américain has the feel of a cocktailing institution. Located in a basement near Piccadilly Circus (and attached to the inexpensive Brasserie Zedel), it’s one of those fast-moving, high-volume places that runs like clockwork. The classics are correct, the service is brisk and courteous, and there’s usually live jazz wafting around.
12. Connaught Bar
Mayfair, Greater London
The Connaught Bar is assuredly the classiest venue in town. Walking into its shiny black art deco interior (designed by the redoubtable David Collins) is like entering a more elegant realm, where everything shines and shimmers. Felicitously, that’s precisely the effect of Agostino Perrone’s unsurpassed Connaught Martinis, served from a trolley with bespoke bitters and Italian charm. Spendy but worth it.
13. Savoy American Bar
London, Greater London
The American Bar, established 1889, was the first proper cocktail bar in London, the quintessential melting pot of actors, playwrights, debutantes, composers, royalty and Americans feeling Prohibition. It’s where Ada Coleman invented the Hanky-Panky, Harry Craddock concocted the Corpse Reviver #2, and Erik Lorincz, first mixed his classic Green Park (gin, lemon, basil, genius). Ask to sit at the bar, use the first edition Savoy Cocktail Book as your menu and admire the bartenders’ clipped efficiency.
14. Lyaness
London SE1 9PD, UK
The re-vamped, new version of Dandelyan Bar by Ryan Chetiyawardana. A menu based on seven ingredients, with three cocktails exploring each flavour. Or, make a cocktail choice by the cocktail map- an easy guide that also allows guests to make decisions based on their favourite glassware. Like its predecessor, this bar is rather glamorous.
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15. Hacha Brixton
London SW9 8LD, UK
The second outpost for this agaveria, dedicated to serving tequilas and mezcals from all over Mexico. Larger than the Stoke Newington original, with a bottle bar downstairs and a lounge up, it’s the perfect stage for its stunning mirror margarita, which uses an acid mix in place of lime juice to create a transparent finish and also make it possible to batch and bottle the drink.