The World’s Best Bars 2009-2022

Today was the official announcement of 2022’s World’s 50 Best Bars – congratulations to Paradiso in Barcelona for being named the World’s Best Bar!

Best of lists are often imperfect, but they are also interesting – especially if you dig into how they are crafted. One of the lists I’ve been following for a while now is World’s 50 Best Bars. I think they have some blind spots and I don’t always agree with their rankings, but they’ve also given us a few starting points for when we travel to a new place, and they’ve helped us find a few new global favorites.

If there’s one thing I love more than a good cocktail bar, it’s cocktail bar data. That might be the only explanation for why I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time digging up the World’s 50 Best Bar lists to 2009. (To be fair, the official lists are easy to find on their website, but I also really like that they publish bars 51-100. I found those back as far as 2015, but it took some digging. Thanks Wayback Machine!)

A few factoids I’ve discovered…

357 unique bars have made the top 100 rankings over the 14 years
89 cities are represented
The five cities most represented are London (49), New York (31), Paris (15), Singapore (18), and Sydney (15)

I’ve spent hours trying to find an amazing way to embed all the data directly onto the site but it’s just unwieldy so alas, a link to the Google Sheet will have to do for now. Not only did I collect and standardize all the lists, I also created a tracker that shows all the data I have for all 14 years, analyzes changes to rank, counts how often each bar has appeared, and calculates their average rank.