Bangkok's 10 best speakeasies right now

The approach matters. You eat at Potong first – or at least you should – moving through Chef Pam Pichaya Soontornyanakij's Michelin-starred Thai-Chinese tasting menu in a Yaowarat shophouse that was, a century or more ago, her family's Chinese herb business. The building seems to know it. Then a tiny elevator takes you upward, two floors, and opens into a room operating on an entirely different register: dark, lacquered, quietly expensive, as though noise has been politely turned away at the door.

Opium is the bar above Potong, occupying the top two floors of a 120-year-old Chinatown shophouse that, according to its own legend, once operated as an opium den. The concept, developed by Arnon 'KK' Hoontrakul and described as ‘liquid surreality’, sets out to blur fantasy and reality. In practice, that means a menu of nearly 50 cocktails arranged across seven clear sections: aperitif, sparkle, acid, acid+, solo, duo and bottle infusions. The categories act as a navigation system, letting drinkers orient themselves without decoding every ingredient on sight. Italian bartender Matteo Cadeddu, whose résumé spans Australia, Singapore and Mumbai, leads a programme that rotates seasonally and earns its ambition. 

Opium entered Asia's 50 Best Bars at No. 43 in 2025 and appeared on the World's 50 Best extended list at No. 92. It has also handled one particular challenge with grace: keeping pace with Potong below, where Chef Pam was named Asia's Best Female Chef in 2024 and World's Best Female Chef in 2025. Opium exists in that orbit without being swallowed by it – a bar worthy of the building, not merely adjacent to its reputation.

The drinker this suits: someone who wants a menu to think about, not one to rush through. A good date bar – the kind where you stay longer than planned.

422 Vanich Soi 1, Samphanthawong. Open Wed-Sun, 6pm-midnight.

There are 71 rooms at Josh Hotel in Ari, and then there is the ‘seventy-second’. To get there, you do not head down a corridor looking for a room number. You go to the front desk, like any guest checking in, and ask for a key. The keycard comes with a small deposit and a half-wink from whoever hands it over, since everyone behind that desk knows exactly what you are really asking for.

The room itself, once you find the unmarked black wall that hides it, is tiny and red, lined with mirrors and lit like a 1960s den that never got the memo about the decades passing. Two small screens loop quiet, quirky films in the background. The whole conceit is built around a fictional character: Mr Josh, a globe-trotting bon vivant whose imagined travels provide the menu's throughline, each cocktail a postcard from somewhere he claims to have been.

Mr Josh's Journey makes the house style clear: a whisky-based twist on an Old Fashioned, topped with caramelised sugar flakes. A Drop of Tokyo runs lighter and stranger – vodka and Japanese sake cut with lemon juice and wasabi syrup, sweet and citrusy with a slow, creeping heat that catches you a beat after the first sip. Marilyn 1950s leans sweeter still, with vodka and Malibu rounded out by honey, cinnamon, lime and grapefruit bitters, often finished with a wisp of smoked cinnamon over the top.

No towering concept, no design pedigree to cite – just a tiny red hideaway that earns its place by being exactly as much fun as a secret room behind a hotel front desk should be.

The drinker this suits: anyone who wants the first round of the night to feel like they have gotten away with something. A good ice-breaker bar, low on pretension and high on theatre.

Josh Hotel, 19/2 Soi Ari 4, Phaholyothin Rd, Phaya Thai. Open daily, 6pm-1am.

Beneath The Coach Hotel on Sukhumvit 14, a flight of red-carpeted stairs leads down into a room fully committed to Prohibition-era Chicago, gangsters and all. The live jazz band works through standards that seem to rise naturally from the room itself.

The cocktail menu reads like a rogues' gallery, organised into chapters with names such as The Velvet Rebellion and The Dark Commission, each drink tied to a real figure from the era. The Red Innk Scandal, named for Al Capone, mixes gin and port wine darkened with charcoal into something tart and velvety; The Silk Road Commission takes its cue from Pablo Escobar, with cocoa fat-washed bourbon and coffee cordial landing bittersweet and quietly dangerous. Lucky's Heritage, after Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, pairs gin with olive and rosemary vermouth and a thread of basil olive oil. There is a lighter register too: Soapy Suds Gin, inspired by Arnold Rothstein, hides real strength behind elderflower, honey and chamomile foam, while the Georgia Peach Blind Pig, a nod to Bonnie Parker, is a fruity, effervescent toast of Cocchi Americano, peach and Prosecco.

Food leans into the bit just as hard. Dishes carry names such as Underboss Burger, Bluefin Conspiracy and Tommy Gun Shrimp, right down to dessert categories filed under ‘The Final Evidence.’ A private cigar room sits off to one side for anyone who wants to extend the cosplay a little further.

The drinker this suits: groups celebrating something, fans of old gangster films and anyone who wants a night out that feels like a stage set rather than a backdrop.

The Coach Hotel, 41 Soi Sukhumvit 14, Khlong Toei. Open daily, 5.30pm-2am.

The house on Kasemsan Soi 3 has been in the Kasemsuwan family for more than a century, designed during the reign of Rama V by the same Italian architects responsible for the Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall. In the late nineteenth century, the patriarch Boonmee Kasemsuwan – better known as Moh Mee – concocted his famous herbal medicine in the basement, distributing it across Bangkok by canal. After he died, the family sealed the chamber.

When Nachapol 'Na' Kasemsuwan, a fourth-generation descendant, decided to open a bar, he went underground. Philtration – from ‘philtre’, meaning potion – occupies that original basement. The concept was not invented so much as excavated.

The entrance requires patience: a heritage compound, a left turn, an antique medicine cabinet, a door that reveals itself only if you know how to look. Inside, the basement is cave-like and warm, lit dimly, with much of the original interior left deliberately intact. A live band plays most nights. The room vibrates slightly with it.

Every drink still carries a mock health claim – a wit inherited from Moh Mee's remedy packaging – but the 2026 menu is the most technically ambitious the bar has produced. The signature Janette Bond's Martini reworks the classic with pomegranate-infused vodka, U-Thai Moh Mee herb, rose vermouth and pomelo-zest gin. Sweet Tears of Mine 2.1 builds on Colonist Spiced Rum, now house-infused with lemongrass and kaffir lime, balanced by Tio Pepe and sharp Granny Smith juice. The Witcher arrives tableside in tamarind-shell smoke, its base a pork fat-washed white rum with more Moh Mee herb and tamarind syrup – the kind of drink that sounds like a provocation until it doesn't.

Newer additions sharpen the programme's identity. Waste Not!, built around lacto-fermented watermelon-skin brine and clarified watermelon juice, began as an environmental principle and ended up one of the most drinkable things on the list. Beneath Earth goes the other way: black truffle, house peach liqueur and truffle balsamic over an ice ball, with a cognac upgrade ladder running from Askaneli 3 Year to XO. Several cocktails now use house-made liqueurs – kaffir lime triple sec, coffee-banana liqueur, peach liqueur – giving the bar a creative depth that off-the-shelf programmes simply cannot replicate.

What separates Philtration from bars that borrow the speakeasy form without earning it is that it has something irreplaceable at its centre: an actual building, an actual story and a family still telling it. The concept was not designed. It was revealed.

2 Kasemsan Soi 3, Wang Mai, Pathum Wan. Open daily, 7pm-2am.

The elevator doors open on the thirtieth floor, and suddenly you are in a record shop. Some 6,000 vinyl records line the shelves, with a DJ on hand to spin whatever you fancy or sell you a copy to take home. Only after passing through that anteroom – past the listening counter, past the cassette corner – do you reach the bar itself. AvroKO, who designed the space, calls the record shop an anti-room: a deliberate surprise placed between the elevator and the main event. It is the rare hotel speakeasy where the concealment is not cosmetic. You genuinely do not know what is coming until you walk through it.

What comes next owes more to a mid-century recording studio than to any prohibition-era pastiche. Floor-to-ceiling sloping glass frames the Bangkok skyline, two lounges flank a central bar anchored by a soaring vertical chandelier inspired by Vienna Secession design, and a spiral staircase rises to a mezzanine cigar lounge stocked with a proper humidor. Live performances run Thursday to Sunday, 8.30pm-11.30pm, threading through the room without ever overpowering it. The effect is part Gatsby, part hi-fi shop, entirely its own thing.

The bar programme has recently changed hands in a way worth noting. Rosewood Bangkok appointed KT Lam as its new Director of Bars, overseeing Lennon's alongside the hotel's other beverage outlets. Lam previously led DarkSide at Rosewood Hong Kong to ninth place on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2023, and took Sora at Rosewood Phnom Penh to No. 65 on the 2025 extended list. Under his direction the cocktails have turned toward Thailand's own distillers.

The Bangkok Beats menu is built around Thai street-food nostalgia. One standout is Sol Tum, inspired by som tum, Thailand's grated papaya salad, carrying the dish's collision of sour, hot and sweet into glass form. The bar's Taste of the Golden Era list still anchors the room in the classics, so newcomers and traditionalists are never left without a way in.

The drinker this suits: vinyl obsessives, whisky drinkers and anyone who has ever wanted a bar to feel like the inside of someone's record collection.

30/F Rosewood Bangkok, 1041/38 Ploenchit Rd, Lumpini, Pathum Wan. Open daily, 6pm-midnight.

Most Bangkok speakeasies hide below street level or behind some unmarked door at ground floor. This one inverts the formula entirely, lifting the genre's vintage conceit twenty-four storeys into the air across two stacked floors of Hotel Muse in Lumphini. 

The result has little need to hide – the golden dome announces itself from blocks away – but the 1920s Art Deco detailing is thorough enough that the contradiction barely registers. The lower floor holds a covered Art Deco terrace with a retractable roof, alongside an indoor Garden Lounge and, behind a velvet curtain  because no speakeasy concept here would be complete without one more door, a hidden members' room called The Blind Pig. 

Climb a level further and the building opens completely: a fully open-air rooftop with 360-degree views, a Secret Garden, and a trio of private domed structures the hotel calls the Secret Domes, built for proposals and the kind of anniversary dinner that wants total privacy at altitude. The cocktail programme draws its throughline from King Rama V's royal journeys abroad, turning each signature drink into a stop on an imagined royal itinerary – part history lesson, part excuse for some genuinely well-built classics alongside the new creations. European small plates and Thai fusion bites round out the menu, with satay fries and a surf-and-turf plate among the better-reviewed dishes.

The drinker this suits: date nights, proposals, out-of-town guests who want the view and the theme in one outing, and anyone who has decided that a speakeasy and a rooftop bar don't need to be mutually exclusive.

Hotel Muse Bangkok Langsuan, Autograph Collection, 55/555 Lang Suan Rd, Lumphini, Pathum Wan. Open daily from 4pm.

The door handle is a cocktail shaker, for starters. Niks Anuman-Rajadhon has been building bars on Soi Nana since 2015, when this alley still had teenagers sniffing glue outside the youth centre on the corner. He named that first bar after them – Teens of Thailand, a gin destination that helped redirect Chinatown's gravitational pull towards a different kind of night. Then came Asia Today, TAX and Independence Bar. Each one pushed further than the last. G.O.D., which opened in April 2024 and which Niks insists stands for Genius On Drugs, is where he and co-creator Attaporn De-Silva appear to have decided that restraint belongs to someone else.

The space was built from two abandoned shophouses fused together over three years. The upper floor was removed entirely to create a single high-ceilinged room that feels, depending on the light, like a concrete bunker or a Brutalist cathedral: raw stone walls tagged with graffiti, stained glass panels bleeding red across the room, restored Altec A6 cinema speakers flanking the bar. Most nights, a live pianist hammers out brooding baroque compositions into that space, the notes bouncing off surfaces that were not designed to be gentle to sound. Before you reach the bar, you pass a Palad Khik – a giant phallus and Thai fertility symbol – positioned near the entrance. You are invited to rub it for luck. 

The menu's logic is categorically its own. Drinks are divided between oyster cocktails, uni cocktails and a section titled ‘excessive is necessary’ – a chapter heading that could serve as the bar's entire philosophy. The Uni Martini, the calling card, arrives impossibly cold with a scoop of Bafun sea urchin resting on the back of your hand and a hay-smoked olive alongside. The recommended sequence – uni first, martini in one cold gulp, olive to close – is less a cocktail order than choreography. The 4 Cheezus, from the excessive section, pairs  pecorino distillate with Madeira wine, mozzarella water, gin and wild honey, and somehow holds together. Elsewhere, blue cheese foam, minced meat vodka, banana vinegar and oyster juice appear as ingredients that could easily overwhelm; here, they are handled with the precision of a kitchen that knows exactly what it is doing and is enjoying every moment of the provocation.

Every drink comes paired with a small bite – ikura bombs, ramen spheres, pandan cakes, truffle chicharron – positioned not as garnish but as a structural counterpoint to what is in the glass. The pairing logic extends the drink, frames it and sometimes reverses its finish. It is among the more genuinely original approaches to cocktail service in a city that now has many original approaches.

G.O.D. placed No. 26 on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2025 and No. 3 at the Bangkok Bar Show Awards that same year – remarkable for a bar that had only been open since April 2024. The ranking feels both deserved and, possibly, a mild undercount.

The drinker this suits: those with an adventurous palate and no sentimental attachment to the way cocktails are supposed to behave. Also the natural final stop on a Soi Nana crawl, for anyone still standing.

25/27 Soi Rammaitree (Soi Nana), Pom Prap, Pom Prap Sattru Phai. Open daily, 7pm-1.30am.

There is a wooden door on a quiet stretch of Thonglor, between Soi 5 and Soi 7, marked only by a small carved rabbit head. No sign, no queue rope, nothing that announces what is behind it – just the head, low on the door, easy to miss if you're not looking for it. Push through and the reference clicks into place: this is Alice's rabbit hole, reimagined as a three-storey Bangkok speakeasy, dim and velvet-heavy, with exposed brick meeting marble counters and the occasional mural that would not look out of place in Wonderland.

Rabbit Hole turned ten this year, old enough now to count as an institution in a scene that reinvents itself every eighteen months. It made Asia's 50 Best Bars list as early as 2020, ranking No. 31, and has stayed a fixture of the conversation since. The current menu, led by head bartender Noppasate ‘Depp’ Hirunwathit and the Rabbit Hole team, trades the bar's old alphabet conceit for something more travelogue: sixteen cocktails, each one built around a world capital and paired with a crossword clue that doubles as a flavour hint.

Havana arrives as aged rum, salted banana and chaat masala lifted with sparkling wine; Tokyo is a cold, briny thing of gin, nori liqueur, clarified pineapple and wasabi cut with yuzu tonic. Beijing washes bourbon in duck fat and folds in hoisin and five-spice, a drink that reads more like a dish than a cocktail. The Bangkok entry, fittingly, closes the loop on home turf – Thai spirit and rum stretched with a coconut pandan shrub and warm coconut milk mousse, the kind of dessert-adjacent pour you would expect from a city this confident about its own street food.

This year, marking the anniversary, several of the bar's original signatures returned to the list in their first form through the end of April – Mad Hatter, Clueless, and a Smoke Peach Old Fashioned among them – a rare instance of a speakeasy looking backward instead of only forward, and a reminder of how much of Bangkok's current bar scene traces its lineage through this one address.

The drinker this suits: travel-minded drinkers who would rather taste a city than read about it, and anyone who wants a cocktail list with both humour and a point of view. A strong first or second stop on a Thonglor crawl.

125 Thonglor Rd (between Soi 5 and Soi 7), Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana. Open daily, 7pm-late.

The founding story of Find The Locker Room reads like an industry fantasy: five of Asia's foremost bartenders, each with their own acclaimed venue in a different city, joining forces to open a single collaborative speakeasy in Bangkok. Ronnaporn 'Nueng' Kanivichaporn from Bangkok's Backstage Cocktail Bar. Colin Chia from Singapore's Nutmeg & Clove. Hidetsugo Ueno from Tokyo's Bar High Five. Nick Wu, who placed third in the World Class Cocktail Competition 2016, from Taipei's East End. Together, they built a bar behind a wall of steel gym lockers in a Thonglor shophouse, named it as a set of instructions and dared Bangkok's cocktail drinkers to find them.

That was 2017. The bar has since relocated once and evolved considerably, but the founding DNA remains intact. The entrance – still through a narrow unmarked alley, still requiring you to locate and slide open the right locker – remains the signature ritual. Inside, the two level space gives way to a cocktail menu divided into Past, Present and Future, a founding idea that remains intact even as the drinks change.

Find The Locker Room remains a consistent presence on best-of lists worth reading. It earns its place here not on historical reputation but on continued execution. The OG of the Bangkok speakeasy scene, as one regular described it in a 2024 review, still feels alive and still feels earned.

The drinker this suits: cocktail enthusiasts who appreciate both craft and mischief. Anyone who has ever been delighted to recognise a cultural reference inside a glass.

406 Sukhumvit Soi 55, Thonglor. Open Mon-Sun, 6pm-2am.

Sukhumvit Soi 6 is not an obvious place to look for quiet. Nana at night runs loud and bright in both directions, and the bars here have historically not been the kind that reward lingering over a well-made cocktail. Door No.6 changed that calculation.

The story begins with a suit shop. Nawin Satchasiree's grandfather opened a bespoke tailoring business on this soi more than sixty years ago, and the family has been cutting cloth here ever since. When Nawin decided to split the space and open a speakeasy in the back half, he did not reach for a borrowed concept. He used the one he already had. The entire cocktail menu is structured around the six stages of suit-making – measure, cut, mark, stitch, press, button – each step becoming a door, each door becoming a drink.

Inside, there are seats at the bar and a sofa arrangement at the back that manages to feel private even when the room is full. The tailoring heritage is there, but quietly so, in details that earn their symbolism rather than wear it on the sleeve.

We'd point to The Measure, a bone-dry martini-style cocktail of vermouth and fino sherry, crowned with a tailor's measuring tape. A neat reminder that every great suit, and every good drink, begins with getting the measurements right.

It is a compact, confident bar. One good idea, executed properly, in a neighbourhood that did not expect it.

25/1 Sukhumvit Soi 6, Khlong Toei. Open Tue-Sun, 5pm-1am.

All venues are current as of 2026. Hours and menus are subject to change – always confirm before visiting.