The World’s 50 Best Bars 2026 will be announced in Milan this October – the first time the ceremony has landed in Italy, and the latest move in 50 Best’s ongoing effort to rotate its spotlight across the cities that actually shape how the world drinks.
The World’s 50 Best Bars 2026 will be announced in Milan this October – the first time the ceremony has landed in Italy, and the latest move in 50 Best’s ongoing effort to rotate its spotlight across the cities that actually shape how the world drinks. The full list, plus The World’s Best Bar title, both sponsored by Perrier, will be revealed at a live ceremony featuring the red-carpet-and-drinks-reception format the event has made its signature. For Italy, it completes a remarkable run: last June, Turin hosted the World’s 50 Best Restaurants for the first time, drawing around 1,300 guests and more than 250 specialist media to Piedmont. Milan now picks up the baton.
Why Milan, Why Now For World’s 50 Best Bars 2026
It’s a fair question: why Milan? And why now for World’s 50 Best Bars. London has hosted. New York has hosted. Barcelona, Singapore and Madrid too – the ceremony has moved around enough that its location is now read as editorial statement as much as logistical choice. Milan is not an accident.
The city has one of Europe’s most coherent cocktail identities – built not on the experimental theatre of the London bar scene or the spirit-nerd obsessions that define parts of New York, but on something older and arguably more durable: aperitivo culture. The Negroni was, depending on which origin story you believe, either invented in Florence or popularized through Milanese café society. The Americano, the Spritz in its original form, the entire philosophy of drinking something bitter and bracingly cold before dinner – these are Italian contributions to global cocktail vocabulary that the industry has been riffing on for decades.
To bring 50 Best to Milan is to bring the global bar conversation back to one of its source texts. Rikki Tidball, Managing Director of Events for The World’s 50 Best Bars, puts it directly: “Milan provides a fitting backdrop,” he says, noting the city’s “rich cocktail heritage and thriving bar scene.” That’s perhaps polished ceremony-speak, but it’s also accurate.
The Year Italy Took Over
The 2025 list made something impossible to ignore: Italian bartenders, wherever in the world they happen to be working, are setting the pace. Bar Leone in Hong Kong – Lorenzo Antinori’s Roman-spirited neighborhood bar – was crowned number one. Just two spots below, Simone Caporale’s Sips in Barcelona took third. Paradiso, by Giacomo Giannotti, came fourth. Agostino Perrone’s Connaught Bar in London landed sixth. Three of the world’s top four bars were run by Italians. The top six included four of them.
Back on home soil, the story was just as strong. Moebius Milano landed seventh, Locale Firenze 22nd, Drink Kong in Rome 40th and 1930 – also in Milan – 43rd.
Moebius made the biggest leap forward of any bar in the top ten, climbing from 38th place in 2024 to seventh in 2025 and taking the Nikka Highest Climber Award in the process. In the extended 51–100 list, Italy placed four more venues – Freni e Frizioni and Jerry Thomas Speakeasy in Rome, L’Antiquario in Naples and Gucci Giardino in Florence – giving the country eight bars in the global top 100. No other country made a comparable argument.
And for anyone at World’s 50 Best Bars 2025 ceremony in Hong Kong, it was undoubtedly the Italian contingent making the most noise. And for anyone at World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025, in Turin, the after event was a wild, warehouse-style party – picture confetti cannons firing, Massimo Bottura punching the air triumphantly with one hand the other around electro-house pioneer DJ Marco ‘Benny’ Benassi’s shoulder. So, World’s 50 Best Bars is undoubtedly heading to the right place.
The One To Watch
Which brings us to Moebius. Founded by Lorenzo Querci in 2019 and housed in a former textile warehouse in central Milan, the venue resists being categorized. Part cocktail bar, part bistro, part cultural hub, the space fuses raw iron, warm wood and natural elements, with a 700-year-old Andalusian olive tree spanning two floors. The cocktail bar, led by Giovanni Allario, offers a seasonal menu that blends culinary techniques with the craft of bartending.
With the ceremony landing in its home city, Moebius enters October with a trajectory and a home-crowd advantage that few bars in 50 Best history have enjoyed simultaneously. It went from No.38 to No.7 in a single year. The question now is whether, with the global bar community gathering on its doorstep, it can make the final jump. The 50 Best lists have a habit of confounding expectations – but they also reward momentum, and Moebius has more of it than almost anyone.
How The List Gets Made
For anyone still unclear on the mechanics: the ranking is shaped by a confidential vote from an Academy of more than 800 industry professionals, journalists and cocktail experts, assembled by 29 regional Chairs. Deloitte independently oversees and verifies the results – an arrangement that matters more than it might seem, given how much commercial weight the rankings carry for the venues that land on them.
The methodology draws discussion every year, as any influential list does. What isn’t disputed is that the list moves venues. A ranking in the 50 Best ecosystem translates into reservation surges, press attention and the kind of international profile deserving of a bar deemed one of the best in the world.
What Else Happens In Milan During World’s 50 Best Bars 2026
The ceremony is more than a list reveal. In the lead-up to October, 50 Best will announce the bars ranked between No.51 and No.100 – the extended list that often generates as much industry conversation as the top tier, partly because it’s where rising venues and underrepresented markets tend to appear first. Two special awards will also be announced beforehand: the Michter’s Art of Hospitality, voted by Academy members nominating the single most outstanding hospitality experience from their voting period, and the Altos Bartenders’ Bartender, selected by the listed bars themselves to recognise a peer who has done the most to advance the craft over the past 18 months.
At the ceremony itself, winners of the Siete Misterios Best Cocktail Menu Award and the Best Bar Design Award will be revealed – categories open to any bar globally, listed or not. The 50 Best Bars Scholarship recipient will also be named: one young bartender earning the opportunity to stage at Line in Athens and Tres Monos in Buenos Aires, two venues that have done as much as any to define what ambitious bar programmes look like right now.
What It Means for Asia
The Asia bar scene has been one of the most consistent stories in the 50 Best ecosystem over recent years – and 2025 put an Italian-run Hong Kong bar at the very top of it. The ceremony moving to Milan doesn’t change the voting, but it does shape who travels, who networks and whose names get repeated in the rooms that matter. For Asian bartenders and bar owners, Milan in October is the pilgrimage. The list doesn’t care where the party is. The industry does.
The live countdown streams on the 50 Best YouTube channel for anyone who’d rather watch from a bar stool than book a plane ticket.
