Best Hotel Bars in NYC

A bar on the 10th floor where the drinks are good enough to be worth the trip on their own. The sustainable wines and craft cocktails aren't talking points here. They're just what's on offer.

The 11th floor opens into sky, steel, and the Brooklyn Bridge directly across the water. The Asian-inspired bites are good enough to notice, but the view is what you're really here for.

Perched on the 40th and 41st floors, this bi-level cocktail sanctuary is a cinematic tribute to the glamour of mid-century Manhattan and James Bond-esque allure. The interior design shifts through eras of elegance, featuring swiveling velvet chairs, brass accents, and floor-to-ceiling vistas of the skyline.

A fully dedicated jazz room under the Crown Building with its own ticketed entry, its own programming, and its own identity separate from the hotel above. The space was designed for performance rather than background listening, with sightlines and acoustics organized around the stage. You don't need to be staying at the Aman to get a seat.

Inspired by the stables of Versailles, this 60-foot bar features vaulted ceilings and crimson velvet. It’s arguably the most glamorous place in Manhattan to hold a crystal glass.

The rooftop bar at the Conrad, with views over the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty, and the New Jersey shore. Italian-inspired cocktails and small plates. Reopening April 2026.

Long pewter bar, warehouse windows running from Crosby Street to Lafayette, SoHo regulars who've been coming since the day it opened. The food is serious without making you feel like it is.

The bar component of the Electric Lemon space, running a cocktail program built around clean ingredients with the same logic applied to the restaurant next to it. It's the version of a hotel bar that only makes sense once you understand the building it's inside.

The outdoor terrace at the top of the building, with unobstructed Hudson River views and programming that shifts from daytime lounge to evening DJ sets. The High Line's northern terminus runs directly below, which gives the terrace a visual continuity with the neighborhood it sits above.

The lobby bar that runs the full daily arc: espresso and pastries in the morning, afternoon drinks, evening cocktails. It holds the ground floor as a gathering space without trying to be anything more than what the moment calls for.

The bar that has been inside the Hotel Elysee since 1936, with Charlie Studin's 1944 paintings of monkeys covering the walls and the ceiling. The space has gone through multiple renovations and ownerships over eighty years without anyone touching them, which tells you something about what each operator understood to be the point.

A rooftop bar and restaurant that mostly operates as if it doesn't know it sits above a hotel. The energy most nights reads more like a packed downtown event than a hotel amenity. Staying here just means skipping the line.

A nightclub tucked one floor below the rooftop bar, darker and more contained, entirely invisible from the street. Guests in the building skip the entry dynamics that everyone else has to navigate.

The ground-floor corner room at Orchard and Canal, with windows open to the street when the weather allows. It runs from breakfast through late evening and serves the neighborhood as much as the hotel. The menu is straightforward and confident, the kind of cooking that doesn't need to explain itself.

The main teller hall of the 1912 Jarmulowsky Bank converted into a cocktail bar with almost nothing removed. The vaulted plasterwork ceiling and original banking hall columns are intact, framing a room that would be impossible to build today. It's one of the most impressive interiors of any bar in New York.

All-day American brasserie on the ground floor with a room that earns its own identity: glass chandeliers, wide leather booths, decorative tilework, and a long bar that leans Art Deco.

Open-air bar on the 13th floor with one of Midtown's most direct sightlines to the Empire State Building — close enough to feel its actual scale. A retractable glass atrium opens to a wooden deck, so the view works across seasons and the evening stretches as long as you want it to.

Named for Winifred T. McDonald, who converted this same ground-floor space into a tea room in the 1920s, when the neighborhood’s Fifth Avenue crowd began to move north.

A library bar designed by Lázaro Rosa Violán where the cocktail program runs on the same culinary logic as the restaurants upstairs. Intimate, well-lit, and built for the kind of conversation that benefits from a second round.

270 degrees of Manhattan from what feels like the top of the city. Brudzinski designed the space as a lightbox in the sky, and at certain hours, particularly sunset, it earns that description completely.

The only place in the world where you can see Ludwig Bemelmans' hand-painted murals while sipping a cocktail. Nightly jazz performances unfold beneath whimsical illustrations that were created as a cultural exchange, not just decoration.

The last cabaret room in New York where the concept of a residency still means something. Bobby Short held the stage here for 37 years. Woody Allen played clarinet for decades. These weren't appearances.

A 12th-floor bar and nightclub that operates as its own venue above the Upper West Side — independent from the hotel below but impossible to separate from what made this block interesting after dark. It earned its reputation before Gossip Girl filmed here, and the crowd never really forgot that.

The Parisian institution — dark blue and gold, caviar and crème fraîche — transplanted from its Place de la Madeleine address into The Mark's Upper East Side lobby. The menu that's been making Parisians spend irresponsibly since 1927 is now doing the same here.

The Mark Bar runs along the front of the hotel as its own social room — connected to the restaurant in spirit but with a separate identity, and no reservation required. It's where the neighborhood comes to drink on its own terms.

Jean-Georges's main dining room at The Mark is French-influenced without being formal — shareable, seasonal, and built around the idea that dinner here should take its time. The culinary weight matches the hotel's ambition.

A gilded cocktail bar tucked off The Plaza's Grand Lobby, built for leisurely afternoons and pre-dinner ceremonies. The question here isn't whether to order champagne — it's which one.

The Plaza's century-old dining room and the original home of Afternoon Tea in New York. Under a stained-glass skylight that remains the most beautiful ceiling in Midtown, it's the benchmark other hotel restaurants still measure themselves against.

The birthplace of the Bloody Mary. A maxim-red mural watches over a century of power lunches and quiet martinis. This bar doesn't pretend to have history. It simply is history.

The hotel's main bar and afternoon tea room, designed by Kit Kemp with the same bold confidence that runs through every floor above it. In a neighborhood where hotel bars tend to feel like obligatory pit stops, this one gives you an actual reason to linger.

A dark, burnished room at the center of the hotel where evenings start for guests who've figured out that the EDITION's ground floor is better than most of Midtown's independent bars.

Dinner theater in the basement where the boundary between performer and audience doesn't exist as a concept. Each night runs differently, which means the same show twice isn't actually the same show.

Michael Anthony, who built Gramercy Tavern’s reputation on cooking close to the source, runs this two-floor American brasserie at the Waldorf’s ground level. Upstairs is a composed dining room built around a rotating seasonal tasting menu; downstairs, the bar runs a raw bar and shareable plates with an energy the rest of the hotel is too quiet to accommodate. Book a room and you have a reason to eat here twice.

Named for the promenade that once connected the original Waldorf and Astoria buildings, where guests dressed to cross a hallway because the hallway was the point. The cocktail program was developed by Jeff Bell, who built his reputation in New York’s serious cocktail scene, and the drinks are organized around the hotel’s most storied former guests rather than flavor categories. Live music plays Tuesday through Saturday starting at 5pm.