No other city has this. Eleven hotel bars, most of them inside a twenty-minute walk of each other, and the weakest of them would anchor the bar scene of a smaller capital. They score the highest Room average in our London corpus — 8.67 against 8.36 for the modern cocktail rooms — because a palace bar is buying you the evening as much as the drink, and the good ones know it.
The Connaught's martini trolley and Dukes' frozen tableside pour are first and second, separated by nothing, and they are two answers to the same question. Artesian is eleventh: a four-time World's Best that now serves a concept menu built around kale and crickets, and the entry says why that costs it. This is the whole group, not a cut of it — the density is the point. Ranked on our editorial score; where a room shows a blended figure, two independent platforms cleared our review floor.
Also in London: The 20 Best Cocktail Bars in London and The 20 Best Pubs in London.
