Super Lyan opened in 2019 and nobody came. Seven menus and one long, slow pivot toward its own city later, the neon-lit cocktail bar nestled into a 17th-century Amsterdam townhouse, home to the Kimpton De Witt Hotel, has been named the best bar in the Netherlands at Europe’s 50 Best Bars 2026. The answer, it turns out, was never the drinks.
Super Lyan opened in 2019 and nobody came. Seven menus and one long, slow pivot toward its own city later, the neon-lit cocktail bar nestled into a 17th-century Amsterdam townhouse, home to the Kimpton De Witt Hotel, has been named the best bar in the Netherlands at Europe’s 50 Best Bars 2026. The answer, it turns out, was never the drinks.Super Lyan is the first international outpost of the Mr Lyan group – the team behind London’s Lyaness, The Seed Library, Dandelyan and White Lyan, and Silver Lyan in Washington, DC – built by bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana inside the Kimpton De Witt Hotel.
One Of The Strangest Looking Bars In The World
In doing so, they flipped every expectation of what a hotel bar should look like. Alex Lawrence, Mr Lyan’s managing director, calls it “one of the strangest looking bars in the world.”
Picture a hotel bar in Europe and grandeur comes to mind, a measure of pomposity. Amsterdam hotel bars in particular “carry that connotation of being kind of fancier or more formal,” Alex agrees. Super Lyan is the opposite. “It’s f*cking crazy is what it is,” head bartender Pierre Louafi laughs. Big pink neon. A riot of color. The whole room was modeled on a 1950s American diner, dropped straight into a building with its original 17th-century plaster still on the walls.
It was all of the above. And, to begin with, it was empty.
It Started At Sea
The bar didn’t click when it opened. Amsterdam in 2019 wasn’t quite ready for it, or the room was too shocking, or the city’s cocktail scene simply hadn’t caught up yet – the team still isn’t sure which. What changed things wasn’t a new drink. It was a new approach.
The shift started in 2022, with a menu called Below Sea Level – built on the Netherlands’ long fight to keep the water out. It was the first Super Lyan menu drawn entirely from local history rather than imported concepts.
The bar kept digging from there, through Flora & Fauna and After Rains Comes the Sun, until the research process hit its most obsessive on Heritage and Generations. “We uncovered stories of optimism, change, resistance, creativity and wonder that are central to Dutch culture,” Pierre explains.
Three Months For One Menu
By Heritage and Generations, that meant spending three months exploring Amsterdam’s own social history. “Three months of research, just for one menu,” bar manager John Papastylianos shrugs.
That research turned up a piece of grim local history: as cars became common on Amsterdam’s cycling-mad streets through the 1950s, children playing outside started getting hit. The death toll climbed high enough that campaigners launched a movement called Stop de Kindermoord – Stop the Child Murder. It became the backbone of the Heritage and Generations menu, and its drink was the Cyclist Cobbler: sherry and fruit built over crushed ice, low enough in strength for a second round, styled on what Dutch cyclists actually find waiting at roadside cafes reachable only by bike.
The guests noticed. “Guests were coming to me like, ‘I cannot believe you know about that story,'” Pierre laughs. “And the research process was really good fun.”
Although John pushes back on the idea that the story does all the work. “It was also just a banging drink,” he interrupts, “even though we talk more about the story and the background. Guests get the drink, and if they’re curious, the conversation might last for hours.”
Every Borough Gets A Glass
After another menu in 2025 tracing 750 years of the city’s history, the current menu narrows the lens all the way down. Amsterdam has eight boroughs, and Super Lyan’s Boroughs of Amsterdam menu gives each one its own glass.
Zuid gets the Super Smash: Toki whisky, fresh citrus and cucumber, with a savory undertow borrowed from the kroket sold out of the borough’s beloved FEBO vending machines. Nieuw-West gets the Nieuwe-Tini – Ketel One vodka, barley sake, vermouth and whey, a nod to a borough where windmill villages older than Amsterdam itself now sit beside more than 190 nationalities.
Noord gets the Concrete Spritz: Roku gin, mineralized tomato wine and banana pickle, built for a district that turned a derelict shipyard into a creative hub without waiting for permission from anyone in government. Centrum – the historic core, and home to Super Lyan itself – gets the 020 Martinez, a spirit-forward pour of Ketel 1 Genever, Dutch vermouth and smoked dulse for a neighborhood where drinking has always been ritual rather than trend.
Feeling Like You Belong Somewhere
“Every serve in Boroughs of Amsterdam had to earn its place by telling a true story,” Pierre says. For John, watching that land with guests is the point of the job. “Watching them fall into the stories behind these drinks, night after night, is what makes this job special,” he smiles.
None of it needs the research to land. There’s fermentation and plenty of technical work behind the ingredients, but nobody at the bar is going to make a guest sit through the footnotes to enjoy the drink.
The bigger picture, the team agrees, is simpler than that – making sure people are comfortable, having a good time, feeling like they belong somewhere. It’s the same instinct that turned their hometown into a research topic, and took the bar from empty to Europe’s best.
Alex puts it simpler still: “The stories are just there to give us focus for creativity,” he shrugs, “because otherwise we’re just making sh*t up.”
