This is the more detailed followup to a reel I posted on Instagram about the regional diversity of the North American bars on The World’s 50 Best Bars list vs. that of North America’s 50 Best Bars. Spoiler alert: the more regional list not only showcases far more cities (not surprising) but the percentage of bars per city is more varied as well.
An Instagram reel is great for engagement, but not the best for presenting data so here is a little more detail about how I got all those numbers. (And holy hell, finding a succinct way to talk about percentages of percents of lists took me a couple of WEEKS. Not to mention the actual data work.)
First off, let’s look at these first four years of North America’s 50 Best Bars. I love seeing the absolute explosion up to 31 unique cities represented on the 2025 list! As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s also really cool that seven of those 31 are brand new to the list (though two, Boston and Seattle, were previously on World’s 40 Best Bars).
Next up, a deep dive into the North American cities that have been featured on World’s 50 Best Bars. While looking for patterns here, one thing I noticed is that over the course of World’s 50 Best Bars, only six North American cities have had more than one bar on the list at a time. And only three have had more than two bars on the list at a time. Does this pattern hold up for other regions? I don’t know . . . yet. But you can bet I’m going to find out.
As you can see, over 47% of the North American bars to ever appear on the World’s 50 Best Bars have been in New York. Now I’m not dunking on New York – it’s an amazing city and I know it’s a cultural center of the world. But that’s a big number, and it’s a big drop to the next couple of cities.
Since sometimes it’s easier to see the relationship between numbers with a visual representation, here’s a funnel chart of all the North American cities that have been on World’s 50 Best Bars.
After the announcement of the 2025 North America’s 50 Best Bars list, with it’s 31 unique cities represented, I got really curious about what would happen if you applied the North America percentages to the World list. After all, the 23 (on average) North American bars that are good enough to also be a World’s Best Bar should reflect what’s doing well regionally, right?
As you can see, it’s similar but just more interesting. (To me, at least)
Of course, this is just one award and one voting system. I wish I could wrap this up with a great way to help 50 Best Bars increase their reach across more of a region, that was easy to implement and didn’t feel like cheating – but I’m not sure what that solution looks like. I know one big challenge is that a voter who lives in Milwaukee is more likely to visit New York (or another large city) than a New York voter is to visit Milwaukee. For now I’m just trying to bring data driven awareness to the issue in hopes of increasing voter pools, promoting more varied nominations for those awards that accept them, and encouraging the people at the top to talk to bars and people they are promoting to see how they feel about all this.
Oh, and I’ll keep telling New Yorkers to visit Milwaukee (and Minneapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, etc) – the Pink Squirrel at Bryant’s is worth the airfare, I promise.