Best of lists are often imperfect, but they are interesting – especially if you dig into how they are crafted. One of the lists I’ve been following for a while now is The 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. 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…
- 391 unique bars have made the top 100 rankings over 16 years
- 83 bars represent over half the list, 308 represent the rest
- 94 cities are represented
- Nine cities represent over half the the 1300 rankings
I finally found a way to embed all the data directly onto the site but it does lose it’s color coding – if you want to see that, head to the original Google Doc here. You can sort by any column heading to see the list for that year. Average is simply the sum of their ranks divided by the number of times they’ve been on the list.
Bar rankings are based on data from The World’s 50 Best Bars – I am not affiliated with The World’s 50 Best Bars or William Reed Ltd.