The 17th edition of The World’s 50 Best Bars unfolded in Hong Kong with the clean, cinematic precision of a night staged for the global cocktail imagination – and yielded two defining shifts. For the first time in the list’s history, an Asian bar ascended to No. 1, signaling a decisive re-centering of the world’s drinking map toward the Pacific. Just as notably, Athens – lithe, inventive, and newly confident – claimed three coveted spots in the top 50, consolidating the Greek capital’s reputation as Europe’s most dynamic bar city right now.

Athens’ ascent is not an accident but a sensibility. The city’s leading bars are fluent in both archaeology and avant-garde, threading Hellenic botanicals through future-facing technique; they treat the Acropolis as mise-en-scène and the Aegean as a pantry. What distinguishes this generation is restraint and intention: ice cut with jeweler’s care, ceramics that feel like artifacts, olive oil that shimmers where another city might garnish with gold leaf. There is hospitality here too – unguarded and genuinely Greek – that softens the edges of high craft.

Read more at Travel.gr/en