The 50 Best Bars has been announced for another year — the 18th such list since starting in 2009.
The list always grabs a lot of attention around the globe, both good and bad, and is a highlight of the year for the global bar community.
First up: a huge congratulations to Melbourne bar Caretaker’s Cottage, and Singapore bars Jigger & Pony and Nutmeg & Clove, for making the list this year.
Three Horses, the second bar from the Caretaker’s crew, also picked up the One To Watch award, which is encouraging for the bar’s chances next year — of the nine previous winners of that award, seven have landed on the list the following year.
It was a tough year for both Australia and Singapore, at least as far as recent years would suggest.
In some respects, Australia had its worst year on record at The World’s 50 Best Bars this year. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Australia is often an outlier on the list.
Only four countries have made it onto every top 50 list since 2009: the USA, the UK, France, and Australia.
Singapore has fared almost as well, landing on 17 instalments of the list and missing just one, in 2010. But Singapore has been on a downward trend in recent years, from a list-topping six bars in 2021. This year just two bars make the list.
Now, a disclaimer. I am an academy chair for The 50 Best Bars, but I don’t have any secret knowledge on how the list is pulled together other than what is publicly available — I’m just looking at the rankings.
And a quick note as to how we’ve pulled this information together: we’ve used Claude to collate and input the data from each list since 2009 from sources available on the web, and have used Claude to interrogate that data rather than doing the maths ourselves. But nothing in this piece has been written by Claude or by AI more broadly, nor will we ever use those tools to write stories and analysis.
OK — let’s dig into the results a little more.
How did Australia do this year?
The 2026 list is the worst showing Australia has had since the list began. It is the first time in the 2020s that Australia has had just one bar on the list, and only the third time ever (the last being in 2019, when Maybe Sammy was ranked 43).
Caretaker’s Cottage made its fourth straight appearance on the list, at its lowest ranking — a result one might expect with the debut of their second bar, Three Horses, potentially splitting their vote (the new bar landed at 84 on the 51-100 list, and scored the One To Watch award last week.)
2026 is only the second time in the 18 year run of the list that a Sydney bar has not made the list.
How did Singapore do this year?
Singapore also had a tough year this year, with just two bars landing on the list: Jigger & Pony (at 18, down from 9th in 2025), and Nutmeg & Clove (38, up 12 places from 50 in 2025.)
The city has previously had two bars on the list (in 2022 and 2025), but this year the bars land lower than previously.
Jigger & Pony’s result means it is now equal to Manhattan as the Singapore bar with the most appearances on the list, with each bar landing eight times. Another appearance for Jigger next year will see them take the lead.
Singapore now sits behind Hong Kong (four entries) and Bangkok (with three entries).
Which countries outperformed expectations?
It was a particularly good year for a quartet of countries: France, Colombia, the SAR of Hong Kong, and Thailand.
France — thanks to a four Parisian bars making the list, the most since 2013 — outperformed its recent average of two bars per list (2021-2025).
Colombia has averaged one bar on the list between 2021 and 2025; this year, thanks to two new listings from Medellín, they have scored three.
Hong Kong scored its best result, with four bars on the list and the world’s number one bar, Bar Leone, scoring a second win.
And, mirroring its success in Asia’s 50 Best Bars earlier in the year, Thailand had its most successful year on the global list, with a record three entries on the list, and its highest placing yet with Bar Us landing at number four.
What’s the likelihood of a bar making a comeback to the list?
After seven straight appearances on the list, and an all time high ranking of 11th (in 2020), Sydney bar Maybe Sammy dropped off the list in 2026, landing at 75 on the 51-100 extended list. So what are the chances of them making a comeback?
Historically, across the last 10 years of results, the likelihood that a bar drops off the list and makes it back on after a year is 10 percent. With 17 bars dropping off the list in 2026 — among them bars like London’s Tayēr, Hong Kong’s Coa, and New York’s Double Chicken Please — history suggests that one or two of those bars will be back in 2027.
The percentage of bars that made it back onto the list after a two or three year absence, however, is even smaller — just three percent.
For Maybe Sammy to make it back on next year, however, would mean that it would have to buck history: no Australian bar has ever returned to the list one year after being dropped. The much missed Sydney bar, Bulletin Place, did however return to the list in 2020, after last appearing in 2016.
The good news for bars that are on the list this year: there is a 70 percent chance they’ll be back next year, based on the figures from the last 10 years.
Shouldn’t there be more bars from Australia on the list?
As the academy chair for Oceania, this is a question I get all the time.
Of course I would like to see more Australian bars on the list. I also know that the bar world is a very big place, and bigger than ever.
The voters for The 50 Best Bars are assembled from 29 regions, each with an academy chair who corrals the voters.
This year the Oceania region, with just one bar on the list, slightly underperformed the average. 15 of the 29 academy chair regions were represented on the top 50 this year, with the average number of bars on the list per million people within that being 0.029.
Oceania — which includes Australia, NZ, and the Pacific — has 0.021 bars per million people.
The best performing academy chair region this year on this basis was the USA Northeast, with its four bars on the list all coming from New York at a rate of 0.069 bars per million people, as you might expect given the outsized role the city has played in the bar world over the last 150 years.
The France region was next on the list, with 0.060 bars per million people, followed by Spain & Portugal (0.051), and the UK & Ireland with 0.040 per million people.
Over the last five years of lists, five regions have outperformed the average every year: USA Northeast, Spain & Portugal, Nordics, Italy, and UK & Ireland.
A recent high-water mark for Oceania came in 2021, with four Australian bars on the list, and outperforming every other region on a per capita basis. 2026 marks the toughest year for the Oceania region, but it’s worth noting that not every region makes it onto the 50 best list: Canada, with two academy chair regions, has never had a bar on the global 50 best list; Australia, meanwhile, has always had at least one bar on the top 50.
That’s where Australia is in some rarefied air. Only four countries have made it onto every list; Australia, the UK, the USA, and France.
If you’re looking at the academy chair region with the most bars on the list in total, however, one need only to look at the gargantuan South American region, with nine on the list — including two bars in the top 10. The region holds some 440 million people, with four of its nine entries making their debut on the list this year.
