Move over World’s 50 Best Bars and World’s 50 Best Cocktail Bars: there’s a new boozer-rating awards body in town. Called the Pinnacle Guide, it’s a newly-launched Michelin-style system for highlighting the world’s best bars.
The Pinnacle is ‘aiming to become the cocktail bar industry’s most respected accolade of excellence’ and it dishes out ‘pins’ to worthy bars. ‘Excellent’ bars get one pin, ‘outstanding’ ones get two, and ‘exceptional’ ones get three. The guide decides who gets pins through a mix of interviews and anonymous reviews.
The Pinnacle just released its first bunch of ‘pinned’ bars and, excitingly, four UK bars have received two pins. No British bars have three pins because, well, no bars on the planet yet have that accolade.
Nipperkin and The Spy Bar At Raffles in London, Panda & Sons in Edinburgh and The American Bar At Gleneagles are the selected few to get two pins. Only 12 bars in the world currently have two Pinnacle Guide pins, so it’s not to be sniffed at.
More UK bars received one pin (15, to be exact), rubbing shoulders with esteemed cocktail joints in New York, Sydney and Singapore. Here’s the full list of one-pin British bars.
- Artesian, London
- Blue Bar at the Berkeley, London
- Couch, Birmingham
- Kiki Lounge, Isle of Man
- Kol Mezcaleria, London
- Kwãnt Mayfair, London
- Nightjar Shoreditch, London
- Passing Fancies, Birmingham
- Rattlebag, Belfast
- Sexy Fish, London
- Sexy Fish, Manchester
- Side Hustle, London
- Swift Soho, London
- The Guards Bar and Lounge at Raffles London, London
- Velvet By Salvadore Calbrese, London
More UK bars could still be added to the guide, with the deadline for new submissions being the end of this month. More pins will apparently be dished out later this year.
You can find out more about the list and all the UK bars on the Pinnacle Guide website here.
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