Best bars in London - Cool bars

Baltic

With a small square of front terrace, a modern bar and a grand, sunken restaurant, this little piece of Poland has been a worthwhile stop on Waterloo bar crawls for many a year.
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Boisdale

The drinks menu at this part-sophisticated, part-kitsch Scottish-themed enterprise – tartan everywhere – is less of a list and more of an encyclopaedia. The histories of various whisky regions are outlined within its pages, which also contain individual tasting notes worthy of the most pedantic oenophile.
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Book Club

This busy but commendable bar-club comprises one expansive room – divided by a wall with an oval hole in the middle, giving the illusion that half of Hoxton is here – and a small pool room downstairs.
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Booking Office

Epic, soaring, dramatic, magnificent. The Booking Office really is quite an amazing place for a drink.
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Cinnamon Club

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This classy two-floor operation, an imposing space that easily reveals its past as a public library, is divided between a top-notch Indian restaurant, a trendy evenings-only DJ basement and a study-like cocktail bar by the lobby.
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Crazy Bear

Perfectly groomed hostesses greet arrivals to this basement den. The atmosphere is lively and, better still, the cocktails are superb.
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Giant Robot

The building that formerly held Match EC1 was revamped in 2010 by Match supremo Jonathan Downey, and in pretty fine style.
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Hakkasan

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This long, thin strip of a bar behind the Chinese screens of Hakkasan's exalted dining room gets astonishingly crowded, and with good reason.
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Happiness Forgets

This tiny basement has such low light that torches ought to be provided to aid with reading the drinks list. But low light makes the room – dark walls and dark wooden floorboards – just that much more appealing.
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Loft

Happily for SW4's discerning drinkers, this first-floor bar is still missed by the party-hunting.
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Lost Angel

You don’t expect to find a bar like Lost Angel along this sorry-looking stretch of the Battersea Park Road, but there is a precedent: this building was once home to Dusk, which brought a little glamour to the street.
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Loungelover

Loungelover’s sultry surrounds were created out of necessity more than anything else. London needed a fabulously hip space for knockout cocktails.
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Mark's Bar

Opened in 2009, together with the Mark Hix-operated restaurant on the ground floor, this is a destination in its own right. It’s a subterranean speakeasy with plenty of style – low zinc bar, tin ceiling panels, comfortable Chesterfields, bar billiards table – but with precious little attitude.
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Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town

For a so-called ‘secret’ speakeasy, there’s been an awful lot of publicity about this new basement bar beneath the new Breakfast Club in Spitalfields.
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Milk & Honey

You could walk past the door of this Soho speakeasy every day and never know it was there, and that's just how the owners like it. 
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Pearl Bar & Restaurant

After passing the flunkies gesturing to chauffeured guests as they pull into this upscale Marriott outpost, you’ve a choice: to the right, the CC Bar to the right; to the left, Pearl, part French restaurant and part cocktail bar.
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Social

Neil Thomson’s photographs of the Social’s tenth birthday celebrations sum up this most successful of music bars.
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Trailer Happiness

Remaining laudably tongue-in-cheek while the rest of Ladbroke Grove drowns in chichi spots, Trailer Happiness is not a cocktail bar as such – with its deliberately tacky decor (Tretchikoff paintings galore) and DJ hatch, it’s far too informal for that.
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