Earlier this week, the 50 Best organization announced its list of the top bars around the world. If you’re familiar with the 50 Best Industrial Complex (kidding, but also, it’s a lot: one for each continent, for restaurants, for hotels…), by now, you know the deal. The organization taps 800 experts including bartenders, drinks writers and others in the cocktail industry to anonymously vote on their eight “best bar experiences of the previous 18 months.”
Any organization that dares to make such a definitive list will have its detractors. While covering the restaurant counterpart, Alan Sytsma wrote in Grub Street: “In the beginning, the list was intended to be something of an antidote to Michelin’s staid system of stars, but over its two decades of existence, it’s begun to feel as predictable and exclusionary as the tire guide it was meant to replace.” Others have criticized 50 Best for sexism and for treating the accolades like a “popularity contest.”
Is it a popularity contest? Without rigid criteria for nominating a bar, it’s hard to actually tell what kind of contest this is. That’s why we decided to run the numbers to try to get to the bottom of it. After looking at locations, menus, social media followings and more, here’s what it apparently takes to be a 50 Best bar.
The most awarded countries are the U.S. and the U.K., with five bars each. Albania, China, Slovakia and Sweden—four countries not represented in 2024—debuted this year. The most represented continent is Europe, with 23 bars, and the most popular city is New York City, with four bars, followed by Paris and Tokyo, with three bars each.
This year’s award ceremony took place in Hong Kong, which is also home to Bar Leone, No. 1 on the list. “This recognition not only highlights our hard work but also affirms that our city belongs at the very heart of the global bar industry, celebrated for its creativity and warm hospitality,” Lorenzo Antinori, the bar’s owner, said via press release.
Sixty percent of bars on this year’s list were also featured in 2024. 50 Best awarded the Milan bar Moebius Milano, No. 7, its “highest climber” award, moving 31 places year over year.
Superbueno, No. 12, also made a jump, up 15 places from last year. Asked whether the team had made significant changes since 2024, owner Ignacio “Nacho” Jimenez says much of the program has stayed the same, though the recognition from 50 Best and other honors (including Punch’s own Best New Bars of 2023) has enabled the team to “welcome guests from around the world for a Superbueno experience.”
Most of the bars on the list are fairly new: Nearly half were opened in the 2020s, and two of those were opened last year. The oldest bar on the list is Athens’ Baba Au Rum, No. 27, which opened in 2009. (That is, of course, unless you count Locale Firenze, No. 22, which is literally housed in a Florentine palazzo from the 1500s, though the bar opened in 2015.)
Bars on the list also tend to have large social media followings. We compared the Instagram accounts of every awardee (rounded to the nearest thousand), which range from 6,000 (Nouvelle Vague, No. 28) to 202,000 (Cochinchina, No. 26). The average follower count is around 58,000.
Some critics of the awards say they overprioritize bars with influential PR teams. I looked back in my inbox to see how many of these bars had been pitched to me with a press release or a launch, and, for what it’s worth, only 34 percent of the list had. Also of note, 44 percent of the list has been covered in Punch before.
We looked at the publicly available menus for awarded bars, representing about 80 percent of the list. Because this is such a global ranking, prices vary widely, but generally range from around $10 to $30 (not counting the outlier that is Connaught Bar’s £2,200 extra flashy Rob Roy).
The drink styles of the World’s 50 Best mirror the industry’s larger trends: a reverence for speakeasies; Italian, Japanese and Mexican cocktail templates traversing the globe; and a continual creep toward high-tech bartending. But this year’s No. 1 bar resists the latter. In a landscape that’s riddled with competition, proprietary recipes and technologies, Bar Leone makes all of its recipes available to anyone who subscribes to its email list, and it’s created a stage program to train the next generation of bartending talent. It’s a tribute to old-school Rome’s populist approach to drinks. I, for one, hope that’s the next trend.
Disclosure: Some Punch contributors are part of the voting body for the 50 Best Bar awards.
