The Best Tiki Bars in the World
Fifteen bars, on three continents, that get the drinks right. Ranked by the people who make them, checked in 2026, with one thing to order at each. And a note on why the newest one is in Laos.
Ask a bartender for the best tiki bars in the world and you will get a short list, and it will be almost the same list from Chicago to Bangkok. That is because tiki is a craft with a canon. The drinks were written down between 1934 and 1960, mostly by two men, and a bar either makes them properly or it does not. Rum, lime, sugar, spice, ice, in proportion, shaken hard, served fast. The décor is the easy part.
So this is not a list of the most photographed rooms. It is the bars where the Zombie is built to the 1934 specification and stopped at two, where the Mai Tai has no pineapple juice in it, where the falernum is made in the kitchen, and where the person behind the bar can tell you why. We have ordered them, but the honest answer is that the first six are interchangeable depending on the night, and every bar here would be the best tiki bar in most countries.
How we judged
Four things, in this order. The drinks, measured against the originals. The rum shelf, because a tiki bar with twelve rums is a themed bar. The room, which should transport you and then get out of the way. And lineage: a direct line to Donn Beach, Victor Bergeron or the people who decoded their recipes counts for a great deal. We checked every bar on this list is open and pouring as of September 2026. The photographs are by visitors who released them under open licences; each is credited and linked to its source, and the six bars without one are pictured only in words until we visit with a camera. Two famous names are missing because they are not: Lost Lake in Chicago closed in 2022, and we would rather leave a gap than send you to a locked door.
United States
Tiki was born in Hollywood in 1934 and America still has most of the great rooms. The story of how it started, and who started it, is on our Journal: the man who invented an island and the man who sold it.
1. Smuggler's Cove
San Francisco, United States · opened 2009
Martin Cate's three-level cove is the reference point for the modern revival. More than 1,300 rums, a house rum society with a passport you stamp bottle by bottle, and a menu that walks from Havana in the 1800s to Waikiki in the 1950s without losing a step. It is small, it is dark, and it fills by six. If you drink at one tiki bar in your life, it should probably be this one.
Order: The Zombie. Cate builds it to Donn Beach's 1934 specification and stops you at two.
3. The Mai-Kai
Fort Lauderdale, United States · opened 1956
The last of the great Polynesian supper clubs, open since 1956, and back since November 2024 after four years dark and a restoration that cost more than twenty million dollars. Waterfalls in the garden, a floor show with fire, and the Molokai bar with its rain running down the windows. This is what Donn Beach's followers built when they had money. Nothing else on this list has a lineage this unbroken.
Order: The Black Magic, a coffee and rum drink that has been on the menu since the Eisenhower years.
4. Tiki-Ti
Los Angeles, United States · opened 1961
Twelve stools on Sunset Boulevard, opened by Ray Buhen, who worked for Donn Beach at the original Don the Beachcomber in the 1930s. His family still runs it. No beer, no wine, ninety-odd drinks off a wall menu, and a cash box. It is the smallest bar on this list and the one with the most direct line to the man who started all of it.
Order: Ray's Mistake. Nobody will tell you what is in it, and that is the point.
5. Three Dots and a Dash
Chicago, United States · opened 2013
Down an alley off Clark Street, under a skull-lined staircase, Paul McGee built the bar that taught the rest of America what a tiki revival could look like at scale. The name is Morse code for V, for victory, and the drinks are bright, exact and served in vessels you will want to steal. The rum list runs deep and the staff know it.
Order: The Bunny's Banana Daiquiri, or anything that arrives with a lit cinnamon stick.
6. Hale Pele
Portland, United States · opened 2012
Blair Reynolds makes his own syrups under the BG Reynolds label, and Hale Pele is where they come from. A thunderstorm rolls through the room on a timer, the volcano bowl arrives with real fire, and the drinks are made with the seriousness of a lab and the manners of a living room. Bartenders name it as their favourite more than any other bar here.
Order: The Jet Pilot, a 1958 Beachcomber drink that Reynolds nails.
8. The Golden Tiki
Las Vegas, United States · opened 2015
In Chinatown, well away from the Strip, a bar with a pirate ship, a mermaid, and a row of shrunken heads made in the likeness of regulars and the occasional celebrity. It is open around the clock, as Las Vegas is, and the drinks are better than a room this playful has any right to serve.
Order: The Zombie, built properly, and a photograph with your own shrunken head if you earn one.
9. Trader Vic's
Emeryville, United States · opened 1934 (this site 1972)
Victor Bergeron's company still runs around seventeen restaurants, most of them in the Middle East and Asia, but the Emeryville flagship on the bay is where the Mai Tai lives. It is a restaurant first and a bar second, and it can feel like a museum, but the 1944 Mai Tai is poured from the source and there is no substitute for that.
Order: The 1944 Mai Tai, obviously. The story of that drink is on our Journal too.
Europe
London kept the flame alight through the lean years and Paris caught up fast. Both cities now have rooms that the American bars send their staff to visit.
10. Trailer Happiness
London, United Kingdom · opened 2003
A basement on Portobello Road done as a 1960s Californian trailer park, and the bar that kept tiki alive in London through the years nobody else cared. The rum collection is enormous, the room is loud, and the Zombies are counted. If Smuggler's Cove is the cathedral, this is the pub.
Order: The Zombie, two per person, no arguments.
11. Laki Kane
London, United Kingdom · opened 2018
Georgi Radev's Islington bar is tiki as a cocktail programme rather than a costume: house spiced rums, a rum-blending experience upstairs, and drinks that would hold their own at any bar on the World's 50 Best list. The room still has the rattan and the carvings, but the glassware tells you the drinks come first.
Order: Anything with the house spiced rum, or book the blending session and make your own.
Asia
This is the part of the list that is changing fastest. The fruit that tiki spent ninety years imitating with syrups grows here, and a new generation of bars has noticed.
And one that is not open yet
We are building the first tiki bar in Laos. Swizzle opens on 1 December 2026 in Vientiane, at Pha That Luang, with the canon drinks built to the original specifications, the Zombie limited to two, house falernum and orgeat made from Lao ingredients, and a menu that puts mango, passion fruit, tamarind and Lao rum next to the classics rather than instead of them. We are not on this list because we have not earned it. Come and tell us whether we should be.
Next month on the Journal: the best tiki bars in Southeast Asia, from Bangkok to Manila, and what the region does that the rest of the world cannot.
Three rules for any tiki bar on this list
Order the Zombie first and respect the limit. Ask what rum is in the Mai Tai before you order it, and if the answer is "spiced rum and pineapple juice", leave. And go early: every great tiki bar is small, and every one of them is full by eight.