Bangkok's 8 writer-inspired cocktail bars for book lovers

'A literary mystery cocktail bar drawing on Dickens, packed with Pickwickian escapades and drinks named after his characters.'

Tucked down a Bangkok side street, The Pickwick Chronicles makes a strong claim to being the city's most bookish bar. Wooden shelves line the walls, hardbacks pile up everywhere and the lighting stays just low enough that make the menu feel like part of the mystery. 

The name nods to The Pickwick Papers, or The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club if you want the full Dickensian mouthful. First published in serial form, the novel follows Samuel Pickwick and his companions as they leave London to chronicle life around England, stumbling into comic trouble as they go.

That literary streak carries through to the drinks. Order an Augustus Snodgrass Teddy Bear, a Tracy Tupman, Mr Wardle's Tiki Drink, Samuel Pickwick's Martini or Nathaniel Winkle Vol II and you can drink your way through the cast. The cocktails arrive with proper care, garnishes and all, and the bartenders are happy to explain which character sits behind each glass. A love of English literature helps. A soft spot for Dickens helps even more. 76/10 Lang Suan Road, Lumphini. Open Monday-Saturday, 5pm-2am. Entry is free. Call 098 494 6727.

'A bistro-bar steeped in Hemingway's Paris years, where the cocktails keep things simple but suggest plenty beneath the surface.’

Ernest Hemingway is one of literature's great understaters, a defining voice of the Lost Generation, the phrase Gertrude Stein used for the disillusioned writers and artists drifting through Europe after the First World War. His sentences look simple. They aren't. Every plain line hides something deeper, which is exactly what he meant by his famous iceberg theory.

He wrote The Sun Also Rises while working as a foreign correspondent in Paris, tapping away between café sessions, horse races and late nights with other expats. The novel follows a group of Americans and Britons moving through a world they no longer quite belong to, with Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley carrying the ache beneath all the surface cool.

Which brings us to Hemingway Bangkok. Now in the thick of Sukhumvit Soi 11, the bar-bistro still channels the writer’s Paris years through its easygoing dining room, leafy terrace and travel-worn charm. There's wine, champagne, beer and gin, but cocktails are the reason to lean into the theme. Try the Basil Bellini, Tik Tok Thai or Mexican Moondance, though in honour of the man himself, the daiquiri feels like the order that makes the most sense.

Soi Sukhumvit 11. Open daily, 11am-2am. Entry is free. Call 02 653 3900

‘A Gatsby-inspired bar draped in cabaret glamour, pouring gorgeous cocktails with a dark little sense of humour.’

Crimson Room sends you slipping back towards the 1920s, when a drink could be both a sin and a status symbol, and the good stuff always seemed to be hidden behind a wink. The room is pure Art Deco theatre: velvet banquettes, brass details, low golden light and the feeling that Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway could be tucked in a corner,  nursing something amber while waiting for Daisy Buchanan to arrive. 

1. Scott Fitzgerald knew the American Dream was starting to rot beneath all that glamour. Crimson Room catches the giddy surface of the era, with its jazz-age excess, illicit sparkle and beautiful people pretending not to hurt.

The cocktails are small works of art, dressed with dried citrus, gold leaf or a sprig of rosemary and sometimes carrying a wicked sense of humour. The Market Crash, a cheeky nod to Wall Street's spectacular fall, arrives in a coupe with a paper stock ticker on the side. Order it and raise a glass to things falling apart beautifully.

Come here when you want cabaret glamour, candlelit drama and a drink that looks almost too pretty to touch. Almost. 

Velaa Sindhorn Village. Open daily, 6pm-2am. Entry is free. Call 062 259 2525

‘A candlelit jazz bar that captures big-city loneliness and turns it into something quietly shared.’

Long before Haruki Murakami became a literary giant, he ran a jazz bar. Peter Cat, in Kokubunji in western Tokyo, was where he poured drinks and played records through the late 1970s and early 80s, before the novels made him famous. 

You hear it in the fiction. Jazz, whisky, quiet bars and solitary figures turn up again and again in his work. Flick through Norwegian Wood and the mood is unmistakable: the kind of loneliness you only really feel in a city packed with millions of people.

AloneTogether gets the contradiction exactly right. The name says it all. This is a place for sitting shoulder to shoulder with strangers, drink in hand, jazz playing under candlelight so dim you can barely make out the person on the next stool. The room is small, the records feel hand-picked and the mood is more intimate than showy.

The drinks keep things classic with a twist, from a Frozen Screwdriver and a China Blue spiked with wasabi to a serious line-up of martinis. For anyone who has ever lost an afternoon to a Murakami novel, it feels oddly, wonderfully familiar.

Sukhumvit 31. Open daily, 7pm-1am. Entry is free. Call 02 163 4778

‘A spy-themed Sala Daeng bar so slick even James Bond would slide in and order his martini shaken, not stirred.’

Built around the mythology of spies, secrets and Ian Fleming-style glamour, Rogue Affair carries the hush of somewhere official agencies might quietly pretend not to know about. It’s a stylish sanctuary hiding in plain sight, with just enough theatre to flatter your inner double agent.

Order the Osaka, the Janitor or the Excommunicado and you get a taste of the bar’s obsession with coded lives, hidden motives and names that sound as if they belong in a classified file. It’s sleek, playful and very knowing.

But, much like a certain tuxedoed Englishman, you may find yourself circling back to the classic. The martini. Shaken, not stirred. Ice-cold, faintly ceremonial and still the drink that started the whole myth.

So slide onto a stool, keep your voice low and your intentions lower. Nobody's watching. Or everybody is. Either way, the martini is on its way.

Saladaeng 2, inside PASSA Hotel, 5th Floor. Open Wednesday-Sunday, 6pm-1am. Entry is free. Call 082 852 7999

'Café by day, jazz bar by night, where cocktails, horn lines and Beat Generation restlessness drift together.'

Jack Kerouac wrote the way jazz sounds: fast, loose, unfiltered and full of motion. His 'spontaneous prose' powers On the Road, that restless Beat Generation classic that still sends readers dreaming of highways, late nights and one more bar before morning.

But Kerouac was not only interested in movement and excess. Look closer and there’s a spiritual thread running through the work, especially in The Dharma Bums and Visions of Gerard, where Buddhist ideas, Catholic memory and human longing sit side by side. The famous line about ‘the mad ones’ still burns because he saw something holy in people who refused to sit still.

Buddha & Pals catches that energy nicely. By day, it’s a calm café tucked  among old shophouses, with ceiling fans turning and coffee served slow. By night, the horns arrive, the strings warm up and the room shifts into jazz-bar mode. 

Order a Negroni or a martini, or follow the house drinks named after jazz standards, including  Summertime and Un Poco Loco. Seats fill up fast, so arrive early. Jazz, cocktails, old Bangkok atmosphere and a little holy madness: Kerouac would probably have approved. 

712 Krung Kasem Road. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-midnight. Entry is free. Call 061 585 9283

‘A 1940s-style cocktail bar channelling Hemingway's Cuba, with daiquiris, mojitos and plenty of rum-soaked romance.’

Hemingway may have found his early literary tribe in Paris, but Cuba became one of the great landscapes of his later life.  From the late 1930s, he lived for long stretches at Finca Vigía, his hilltop home outside Havana. It was there that he worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea, the lean, luminous story of a Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin.

Havana Social borrows that world and pours it a drink. Styled as a 1940s Cuban cocktail bar, it goes big on low lighting, dark wood, vintage textures and a back wall stacked with rum. There’s usually music in the mix, plus regular themed nights that keep things from feeling too museum-like. 

The menu splits its Cuban references before and after 1959. Order around and you’ll find Cuba Libre, Jamaican Rhapsody, Plata o Plomo, Fidel's Nightcap and Dias de Verano. Tiki drinks come in ceramic mugs, while mojitos and daiquiris arrive in several versions. The most on-theme order is the Hemingway, made with Flor de Caña white rum, Luxardo Maraschino, grapefruit cordial and citrus. 

Sukhumvit 11. Open daily, 6pm-2am. Entry is free Sunday-Wednesday; B400 including one drink jThursday-Saturday. Call 02 821 6111

‘A Thonglor cocktail bar built on showmanship, puzzle menus and a little Alice in Wonderland mischief.’

Lewis Carroll may have written for children, but Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has never belonged only to them. Beneath the nonsense verse, talking animals and tea-party madness sits a mathematician’s love of logic, wordplay and rules turned upside down. The White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat and Mad Hatter still live rent-free in pop culture, while 'down the rabbit hole' has become shorthand for any strange journey that gets weirder the deeper you go. 

Rabbit Hole understands the reference. Hidden behind a plain door on Sukhumvit Soi 55, the bar leads you into a low-lit room of deep reds,leather banquettes and a long marble counter. It feels less like a literal Alice tribute than a grown-up nod to curiosity, illusion and the pleasure of not quite knowing what comes next. 

The current menu sends drinkers city-hopping from  Lisbon and Paris to Tokyo and Delhi, with cocktails presented as crossword clues to solve before you order. It's a clever touch, and one that keeps the table entertained.

Showmanship drives the whole place. Bartenders shake, stir and occasionally set a garnish alight, while the city cocktails sit around the B450 mark. Classics such as Penicillin and Moscow Mule remain for anyone who would rather skip the puzzle.

For its 10th birthday, Rabbit Hole is also bringing back old favourites including the Mad Hatter, the Clueless and the moke Peach Old Fashioned. Mad as a hatter, and still worth the climb.

Sukhumvit 55 (Between Thonglor 5 and 7). Open daily, 7pm-2am. Entry is free. Call 098 532 3500