World's Best Bartenders and the Bars They Built

World's Best Bartenders and the Bars They Built

Ago Perrone wheels the martini trolley to the table at The Connaught Bar at The Connaught Hotel, Carlos Place, London,¹ then mixes the drink in front of the guest rather than sending it from the pass. He has held that bar for well over a decade, and the service depends on his physical presence at each table. Monica Berg and Alex Kratena built Tayēr + Elementary at 152 Old Street, London² after Kratena's years as head bartender at Artesian, using a split-room format to separate the experimental from the accessible. The bartenders behind the World's 50 Best Bars number in the hundreds, but the makers who built the programs that earn those rankings have often spent a decade or more at a single station. Getting a seat at those counters on a Saturday night is hard: the top-ranked bars seat a fraction of what a hotel bar of that footprint could hold if built for volume, and the names that anchor the list draw international visitors who plan months ahead. Voters for the World's 50 Best Bars must have visited each bar within the previous 18 months,³ which means the ranking reflects recent, firsthand experience of the bartenders' work, and the demand that follows is real. For most readers, the best route is the bar's own site and its published access policy; the three featured venues currently operate without reservations.

Why the Bartenders Who Built These Programs Keep the Rooms Small

The World's 50 Best Bars list, published annually by William Reed Media, is the hospitality industry's most-watched ranking for cocktail culture. The bartenders who land in the top ten tend to run small counters by design: a program built around knowing every guest's glass, a service model that cannot scale without losing the thing that earned the ranking. For readers, that means the counter is the target, and weekdays give you the best chance of seeing the method close up.

Perrone's trolley service means the room seats only a small share of the guests its footprint could otherwise hold. Berg and Kratena designed their split-room format specifically so the experimental side would have even fewer seats.

The limit comes from the method. The bartender has to reach the guest, read the preference, build the drink, and keep the exchange intact.

The list also concentrates demand on the people behind it. Each voter in the World's 50 Best Bars academy casts eight votes based on bar experiences of the previous 18 months,⁴ which means the ranking is built from recent, firsthand visits to the bartenders running these programs, not reputation alone. When a bartender's program moves from number twenty-two to number four, the reservation queue does not grow proportionally; it multiplies. Regulars who booked casually for years suddenly find themselves competing with visitors from Tokyo, São Paulo, and New York who have built a trip around a single bartender. The bartenders themselves become the draw as much as the drink, which means the room fills before the calendar opens.

Lorenzo Antinori, an Italian bartender who opened Bar Leone in June 2023, is a recent example of how quickly a new program can saturate: the bar entered the list in its second year of operation,⁵ and its official site now states that it takes no reservations.

When the Bartenders Behind Top-Ranked Bars Accept Reservations

The World's 50 Best Bars does not publish a unified booking calendar, and the bartenders who run these programs set their own release windows. Most do not publish those windows publicly. Confirm the release window with the bar before you build a trip around a date.

The Connaught Bar operates a no-reservation policy, according to its current public page.

The team at Dante in New York, which has held a top-ten position across multiple years, takes walk-ins for bar seats but accepts reservations for tables; the split is not always published in advance. The staff at Employees Only in New York operates without reservations for its bar counter entirely, which is its own kind of access problem.

Release windows for the bartenders running the top fifty bars are largely unpublished and vary by venue. Confirm directly with each bar before planning travel around a specific date. What is consistent across the list: weekday evenings open later in the booking window than weekends, and early-week nights carry the best odds of a same-week seat at most venues.

The Channels That Actually Work for Reaching These Bartenders

For bars that use a reservations platform, the venue's own website is the first place to check; many link directly to a Resy, OpenTable, or SevenRooms page. Where the bar publishes a booking link, that is the fastest route to the bartender's counter.

For bars that do not publish a booking surface, a direct email or phone call to the venue, made several weeks ahead for a weekday visit, is the method that insiders use consistently to reach the staff.

Walk-in availability at the bar counter exists at a number of the fifty, particularly those that reserve tables but leave counter seats open; arriving at opening time on a Tuesday is a real strategy for getting in front of the bartender, not a consolation.

Mailing lists and social channels matter less for access than for intelligence: following a bar's Instagram tells you when a guest bartender is in residence, which can mean the regular bartender's program is altered, or when the staff is closed for a private event. That information is worth having before you arrange travel.

The team at The SG Club in Tokyo operates differently from many Western entries on the list: its current profile describes Guzzle upstairs and Sip below. The standard booking-platform approach may not apply. Check the venue's current access instructions before visiting.

How Insiders Improve Their Odds With the Bartenders

The bartenders who built these programs are, almost without exception, people who came up through long apprenticeships and who notice when a guest has done the work. That preparation will not replace a booking, but it can change the exchange once you are bench-side.

Knowing Perrone's program before you arrive, understanding that his Connaught Martini is mixed tableside from a trolley he has refined over years, or that the fermentation-forward drinks at Berg and Kratena's Tayēr + Elementary reflect their specific obsession with non-alcoholic integration, tells the bartender that you are there for the craft, not the credential.

That does not get you a seat you could not otherwise reserve, but it shapes the experience once the bartender is in front of you.

Insiders also reserve the bar counter rather than a table wherever the option exists. Counter seats put you in direct conversation with the bartender; table seats, at most of these venues, are served by floor staff. The counter is where the bartender's program lives.

Mistakes that cost people access to the bartenders:

• Reserving for a Saturday in the week the list is announced. The annual World's 50 Best Bars ceremony, held each autumn, triggers a surge in reservation attempts at newly ranked venues; the weeks immediately following the announcement are the hardest to secure across the entire year.
• Treating the bar as a one-drink stop. Most of these bartenders build their programs around a sustained arc; arriving with the intention of having one cocktail and leaving means you are occupying a seat that a guest who wants the full experience would use better, and the bartender notices.
• Ignoring the bar's own direct channel in favor of third-party aggregators. Several bartenders running top-fifty bars do not list on aggregator platforms at all, or list only a fraction of their availability there.
• Assuming walk-in is impossible. At a number of the fifty, particularly those in New York and London where bartenders reserve tables but not counter seats, walking in at opening on a quiet night is a genuine route, not a long shot.

Seasonal Access Calendar

The annual World's 50 Best Bars ceremony typically takes place in the autumn, and the weeks surrounding it are the hardest period to secure a seat with any newly ranked or re-ranked bartender. January and February are historically the softest months for demand at most of the European bartenders on the list; the New York bartenders see a similar dip in early January. Summer in London and New York runs hot through July and August, driven by tourism. If your goal is a counter seat with a top-ten bartender with the least competition, a Tuesday in February is the closest thing to a reliable window the calendar offers.

Bartenders Who Run Comparable Programs With Easier Access

The fifty bartenders on the list are not the only ones where the craft is happening at this level. Several bartenders who have held positions on the list in recent years and have since moved off it, or who sit just outside the fifty, run comparable programs with considerably easier access. If you want the hands and the method more than the number-one address, start here.

Bartenders running programs ranked between thirty and fifty on the current list are a consistently underused route. The ranking gives the same credential, these bartenders often trained under the same lineage as the top-ten names, and the competition for seats is a fraction of what the top tier draws. If the goal is to drink at the level the list represents, rather than to drink with the specific bartender who holds the number-one position, the lower half of the fifty is where the access math works in your favor.

At the Counter: What the Best Bartenders on the List Are Like

The format varies by venue, but the experience at the top of the list shares a consistent shape. You are seated at a counter. The bartender in front of you has, in most cases, spent years at this specific station; the program you are drinking from is the product of that accumulated time on the tools, not a menu handed down from a corporate brief. Perrone wheels the martini trolley to your seat and mixes the drink in front of you, adjusting the ratio to your stated preference; the ritual is the point, and he has refined it over more than a decade of service. At Berg and Kratena's Tayēr + Elementary, the official site currently lists a temporary, walk-in-only relocation to 17 Mercer Street through August 22, 2026 because of a building fire; the split-room format remains central to the concept.

The pacing at these bartenders' counters is slower than a standard cocktail bar. The venue does not publish a standard visit length; confirm with the bar directly, but by most accounts a full counter experience with the bartender runs well past a single round.

The bartenders at this level trained for years under named predecessors, and they understand that the drink is the beginning of the exchange, not the whole of it. You will be asked what you want, and the answer you give will shape what the bartender makes.

Specificity helps: a preference for bitter over sweet, for spirit-forward over long, for something the bartender is currently working on, all of these are more useful than a named cocktail from a different bar's menu.

The rooms themselves tend to be small and quiet enough to hear the ice. That is how the bartender designed it.

Who Should Chase a Seat With These Bartenders, and When

If you are a practitioner, a bartender studying the programs that are shaping the discipline, or a drinks-curious adult who wants to understand what the craft looks like at its current ceiling, the effort of securing a top-ten bartender's counter is worth it once. The counter seat is a working education: you will watch the bartender's technique, hear the reasoning behind a build, and drink something that reflects years of a specific person's obsession. Book the counter, not the table, if the choice exists.

If you are looking for a celebratory drink on a Saturday night with a group of four, the top-ten bartenders are the wrong target. The format does not suit large groups, the wait for a table rather than counter seats changes the experience materially, and the effort-to-reward ratio collapses when the bartender is stretched. Bartenders in the lower half of the fifty, or those who have recently held a position on the list and now run with less pressure, will serve that occasion better.

Worth the Chase?

The World's 50 Best Bars list is a useful map, not a guarantee. The bartenders at the top of it are there because they spent years at a single station building a specific program, making something that the industry recognized as worth ranking. Getting a counter seat with one of them is a genuine experience of what cocktail culture looks like when it is treated as a discipline rather than a service. The access is hard but not closed: a direct reservation, made early, on a weekday, at a bartender in the lower half of the fifty, is a realistic target for most readers.

There is no single waitlist to join. The method that reliably works is patience, specificity, and a willingness to take the Tuesday rather than the Saturday, the bartender at number thirty-eight rather than the one at number one. The bartenders who built these programs are still at their stations. The work is still happening. The seat is available if you plan for it rather than hoping for it.

madeby follows the people behind these programs, the bartenders who trained under named predecessors and built the methods that earned the rankings, so that when a new name appears on the list or a program shifts, you know whose hands are behind it before the crowd catches up.