Two of the five British bars ranked in last year's World's 50 Best Bars have already dropped out of the top 50, with the full 2026 ranking due to be revealed in Milan on Wednesday evening. London's Scarfes Bar, 31st in 2025, has been placed 77th in the extended 51 to 100 list published on 23 September, while Edinburgh's Panda & Sons has fallen from 34th to 72nd.
The extended list, announced by the organisers of The 50 Best Bars, also includes Three Sheets in Soho, which has climbed seven places to 73rd. Two London bars that sat in last year's 51 to 100, Kwãnt in Mayfair and A Bar with Shapes for a Name, are absent from this year's, so they have either moved up into the top 50 or dropped out altogether. The organisers say the list is voted on by more than 800 bartenders, writers, educators and specialists, and 13 of this year's 51 to 100 are new entries. The top 50 will be announced at a ceremony in Milan and streamed live from 8pm local time, 7pm in the UK.
Britain did well out of last year's list. According to Drinks International's analysis of the 2025 ranking, the UK and the United States shared top spot by country with five bars each, and London edged New York as the best represented city thanks to higher placings. Tayēr + Elementary was fifth, the Connaught Bar sixth and Satan's Whiskers 21st. None of those three appears in this year's 51 to 100, so each will either be named in Milan or has fallen out of the list entirely, and for bars placed that high a year ago the first is far more likely.
For most of the list's history the question was not whether London would feature but which London bar would win. Milk & Honey topped the first two editions in 2009 and 2010, the Artesian at the Langham won four years running from 2012 to 2015, the American Bar at the Savoy took the title in 2017, Dandelyan in 2018 and the Connaught Bar in 2020 and 2021. That is ten wins from seventeen editions. Since then the number one spot has gone to Barcelona twice, then to Mexico City, and last year to Bar Leone in Hong Kong. Drinks International noted in the same analysis that the days of London and New York together making up a quarter of the list are gone, with 76 cities having now featured.
Rankings of this kind have their critics, and it is fair to say so. The list is run by the media company William Reed and supported by sponsors, and its voters come from inside the trade, so it measures reputation among peers rather than what paying customers actually drink. A fall from 31st to 77th is also a relative measure. It says as much about the number of serious bars now open in Athens, Accra and Bangkok as about anything at Scarfes, which remains among the hundred most highly regarded bars in the world.
What the best bars pour does tend to reach ordinary menus eventually. Drinks International's separate annual survey of leading bars put the Negroni first for a fifth year in 2026, with the Espresso Martini fifth, as covered here last month, and both are now standard fare in British town centre bars that will never trouble a global ranking.
David Baddeley, founder of Boozy, said: "A couple of British bars slipping down the list doesn't mean ours have got worse, it means everyone else has caught up, and that's healthy. Ten years ago a properly made Espresso Martini was something you travelled into a city centre for. Now you'll find a decent one in most towns, and a lot of that comes from bartenders who learned their trade in bars like Scarfes and the Connaught and then took it home with them. I'll be watching on Wednesday like everyone else in the trade."
For anyone who would rather not travel for one, Boozy's Espresso Martini comes in a single 200ml serve at 12% ABV, and the method for building one from scratch is in the Espresso Martini recipe. The Negroni, top of that bar survey five years running, is covered in the Negroni recipe. Anyone mixing either at home can check the finished strength and UK units in the Cocktail ABV Calculator, which covers more than 100 recipes and adjusts for serving size.
Boozy asks everyone to drink responsibly. Guidance on units and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
