Hong Kong's Bar Leone is the world's best bar again, and its idea came from Rome's corner bars. A hotelier who spent ten years behind a bar reads the 2026 list for travellers.
Hong Kong's Bar Leone was named the world's best bar again this month. For a traveller, the most useful thing about it is where its idea came from: the plain neighbourhood bars of Rome.
For the first ten years of my working life, I kept ending up behind the bar: as a food and beverage trainee at The Marmara and at Swissôtel in Istanbul, as bar supervisor at the Hyatt Regency, and at the corporate openings and private events we ran with our own catering company. So when a new bar ranking arrives, I read it the way you read news from your old trade: with interest, and with a few questions.
The 2026 list of The World's 50 Best Bars was announced in Milan on 7 October. It is worth reading. It is also worth reading correctly.
The ranking is a vote. More than 800 people from 29 regions (bartenders, bar owners, drinks writers and cocktail specialists) name the bars they rate most highly, and the votes are counted. That makes it a good map of where the trade itself goes to learn. It is not a promise about your evening. The voters are professionals visiting professionals. You may arrive jet-lagged on a Friday at eleven, at the back of a queue.
Read it, then, as a reputation among peers, not a guarantee. That is still worth a great deal. A bar that other bartenders cross the world to stand in is usually doing something right with the parts a guest notices last and remembers longest: how you are greeted, how quickly water arrives, whether anyone notices that you have stopped talking.
Bar Leone is No. 1 for the second year running. It opened in Hong Kong in 2023, became the first bar in Asia to top the world list in 2025, and has now kept the title. Its co-founder, Lorenzo Antinori, built it on the traditional bars of Rome's Trastevere district: classic drinks made precisely, small plates, no ceremony. The organisers credit its idea of cocktail popolari, cocktails for everyday people.
That is the honest headline. The best bar on the list borrows from the corner bar, the kind of room a neighbourhood uses every day without treating it as an occasion. Anyone who has stood at a counter in Rome, or sat in a tea house in Istanbul, knows the type: the same faces, short visits, a place to be among people without having to plan it. We have written before that company is one of the most underrated things a journey can give you (Biological Age Is Not Your Birthday). A good bar, at its best, is a room built for exactly that.
Four bars on this year's list sit inside hotels. The Connaught Bar, in The Connaught in London's Mayfair, is No. 8; it has been on the list 17 times and was named the world's best in 2020 and 2021. Argo, at Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, reached its highest place yet at No. 25. BKK Social Club, at Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok at Chao Phraya River, is No. 30. Virtù, 39 floors up at Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Otemachi, is No. 48, its third year in a row on the list.
A hotelier reads that with a particular pleasure, because a hotel bar is among the hardest bars to run well. It has to serve the guest who landed an hour ago and the local who came only for the drinks, across long hours, without the room ever feeling like a lobby. For a traveller the point is simpler: a hotel bar is the one serious bar you can reach on the evening you arrive, without a taxi, and leave in four minutes when the tiredness lands. If you are choosing between two hotels in Tokyo or Hong Kong, the bar downstairs is a fair thing to weigh.
The 2026 list covers 26 cities, with 14 new entries, and Asia holds 14 of the 50 places. Paris now has more bars on the list than London: four, the same as Hong Kong and New York. Mexico City has three, including Bar Mauro at No. 10, the year's highest new entry. Moebius Milano, at No. 2, was named the best bar in Europe. Line in Athens, at No. 5, took the sustainability award, and The Bar in Front of the Bar, also in Athens, climbed 28 places to No. 19. New York's Schmuck entered at No. 11 and was named the best new opening.
No Canadian bar made the global top 50 this year. The regional list, North America's 50 Best Bars, announced in Vancouver in April, put Vancouver's The Keefer Bar at No. 7 and Toronto's Bar Pompette at No. 8, with Toronto's Library Bar, inside the Fairmont Royal York, also on it. For a reader in Ontario, that is the useful fact. You do not need a flight to Hong Kong to learn what a very good bar feels like. You need a weeknight and a train to Union Station.
This is a journal about healthy journeys, so it is fair to ask what a list of bars is doing here. Part of the answer is printed on the list itself: its title sponsor is a sparkling water. The best bars have understood something the rest of the trade is still learning. The craft is in the glass, not in the strength of what is poured into it. A bar of this standard should make you something serious with little or no alcohol if you ask, and in my experience, how a bar treats that guest is the quickest test of its hospitality.
Three questions, if a bar from the list is near your route:
The honest detail. A bar that has just been named among the world's best is, for a season, a harder room to get into: longer waits, more visitors with phones out, fewer regulars. If you want the room the voters described, go early in the week and early in the evening. If you mostly want to sleep well on this trip, have one drink, then go to dinner. The list will still be there next year.
Read honestly, the world's best bar is an argument for the ordinary one: a room near home where you are recognised when you walk in. The habit worth bringing home from Hong Kong is not the cocktail. It is the corner bar.
Ahmet Can Yeşildağ spent over thirty years in the tourism, travel and hotel industry, across four continents — Europe, Asia, Africa and North America — before founding Orophile. He writes here on the design of restorative and longevity travel.
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