The Riedel Shop • Drinking History • April 2026 • 12 min read

The 10 Most Influential Bars in Drinking History

A Templar knight, a hobbit, and Jean-Paul Sartre walk into a bar

The bar is one of humanity's greatest inventions.

We have been building dedicated rooms for communal drinking for as long as we have been building rooms at all, which suggests that the impulse to gather for a pint and a chat predates most of what we consider civilisation and probably in fact contributed to it. Archaeologists have found evidence of taverns in ancient Mesopotamia. The Romans built them into every town they constructed, on the reasonable assumption that soldiers, merchants and administrators all need somewhere to go after work. The British turned the concept into a national institution, the French into a philosophical salon, the Italians into an art form.

What makes a bar influential is not always the quality of its drinks, though that helps. It is the quality of the conversations it enables, the ideas it incubates, the plots it sets in motion, the drinks it sends out into the world.

The ten establishments below, real and fictional, earned their place on my list by doing at least one of those things with some distinction.

A few of them changed history. One of them is cursed. All of them are worth raising a glass in (well, the ones that actually exist are).

Before pubs had gastropub menus, craft lager and the Michelin Guide, they had Geoffrey Chaucer.

The Tabard Inn in Southwark is where the Canterbury Tales begins, its narrator already has three ales under his belt as he surveys his fellow pilgrims and decides they all seem like interesting enough people to walk to Kent with. The inn itself was real, a well-regarded coaching house near London Bridge that Chaucer used as a credible, recognisable setting rather than an invented one.

Its influence is not really about ale. It is about what the Tabard represents: the English tavern as a social leveller, a place where a knight, a miller, a prioress, a merchant and a somewhat suspect pardoner could all occupy the same room, order the same drink, and be expected to contribute equally to the evening's entertainment.

Chaucer's inn is the first great literary bar, and it established a template for the pub as democratic space that has never quite been superseded.

The original building burned down in 1676. A replacement stood until 1873. The site is now a courtyard off Borough High Street, marked by a plaque that most commuters walk past without noticing.

Rebuilt the year after the Great Fire of London, the Cheshire Cheese occupies a spot on Wine Office Court that has housed a tavern since at least 1538. Its location at the heart of Fleet Street, then the axis of London's printing and publishing trade, made it the closest thing English letters ever had to a staff canteen.

Samuel Johnson lived around the corner and is claimed as a regular, though the evidence is largely circumstantial, mostly because he lived close by and was not known for staying home. Dickens was a regular and referenced it in A Tale of Two Cities. Tennyson, Conan Doyle, Yeats, Chesterton, Twain and Wodehouse all passed through.

In the 1890s it hosted the Rhymers' Club, a loose gathering of poets that included the young W.B. Yeats, who later wrote about his “companions of the Cheshire Cheese” with a warmth suggesting that whatever else the Rhymers' Club produced, it at least knew where to get a decent pint. Conan Doyle used it as the backdrop for a Sherlock Holmes case and Agatha Christie sent Poirot there for lunch.

The Cheese is, in short, the pub that British literature actually happened in, as opposed to the many pubs that merely claim a famous writer once dropped in to use the toilets.

The Guinness Book of Records lists Sean's Bar in Athlone as the oldest pub in Europe, with archaeological evidence placing a drinking establishment on the site from around 900 AD. The original landlord was a man named Luain, who ran a ferry crossing over the River Shannon and evidently understood that people waiting for ferries need somewhere to sit, chat and have a cheeky nip. The physics of this have not changed in eleven centuries.

During renovations in the 1970s, the walls were found to contain wattle and wicker dating to the ninth century. Previous owners' names were discovered going back to the pub's earliest days, recorded in a ledger that reads like a roll call of everyone in Athlone who ever fancied a quiet one. The pub's guest book in more recent times has included U2 and Freddie Mercury, which tells you that even famous rock stars are drawn to a genuinely old room with a good pint in it.

Sean's Bar earns its place not for glamour but for sheer continuity. It has been providing people with somewhere warm to have a drink for longer than most of the world's nations have existed. That is a more useful thing to have done than most.

Cut directly into the sandstone cliffs beneath Nottingham Castle, the Trip to Jerusalem claims 1189 as its founding date, aligning it with the Third Crusade and the tradition that soldiers bound for the Holy Land stopped here for what may have been a deeply sensible final drink before a very ill-advised journey. Whether Richard the Lionheart ever actually popped in is debated. That crusaders used it as a staging post before heading to Jerusalem is at least plausible, and the pub has not been shy about leaning into the mythology.

The caves carved into the rock served as a brewery for centuries. Some of those caves are still used as drinking rooms, which is remarkable. A model galleon in a sealed glass case is alleged to be cursed: the last three people who dusted it are said to have died shortly afterwards.

Whether or not it is genuinely England's oldest pub is a matter of ongoing and thoroughly British dispute, contested by at least three other establishments with equally theatrical claims.

The Trip wins on atmosphere.

Few bars can claim to have shaped an entire philosophical movement. The Café de Flore, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, can do exactly that.

During the 1940s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir essentially moved in. Sartre described it as home: he arrived at nine in the morning, wrote until noon, ate, returned at two, talked with friends until eight, then had dinner and carried on drinking.

De Beauvoir completed The Second Sex here. Sartre worked on Being and Nothingness at the same tables, reportedly picking up discarded cigarette butts from the floor when he could not afford tobacco.

Existentialism, in other words, was partly funded by other people's cigarettes consumed in a café on the Left Bank.

Albert Camus was nearby, writing his Resistance journalism for Combat. James Baldwin wrote much of Go Tell It on the Mountain on the first floor, drinking cognac.

The Flore was not merely a place intellectuals happened to congregate; it was a room in which ideas were tested, argued over and made sharper by people who disagreed with each other over very good coffee.

It is now very expensive and full of tourists trying to get a photo sitting in a famous chair. This is understandable. The coffee is still very good though.

Giuseppe Cipriani opened Harry's Bar in 1931 in a former warehouse near Piazza San Marco, naming it after an American called Harry Pickering.

The story behind the name is one of the better ones in bar history: Pickering had been cut off by his family over his drinking habits and Cipriani lent him the money to get home. Two years later Pickering returned, repaid the debt with interest, and told Cipriani to use it to open a bar and name it after him. Which is either a touching story of gratitude or a very expensive way to get your name above a door.

The Italian Ministry of Culture declared Harry's a national landmark in 2001, one of very few drinking establishments to receive that distinction anywhere.

The bar invented two things that now appear on menus worldwide. In 1948, Cipriani mixed fresh peach puree with Prosecco, named the result after a Venetian Renaissance painter whose pink-toned canvases were on exhibition that summer, and created the Bellini. Earlier, he had sliced raw beef wafer-thin and dressed it simply, calling it Carpaccio after another painter.

Hemingway was a regular. So were Noel Coward, Orson Welles, Truman Capote, Peggy Guggenheim, and, according to Evelyn Waugh, the fictional Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited, who drank there on their Venice escapade.

The pub in An American Werewolf in London does not exist, but it should.

John Landis placed it on the Yorkshire Moors for the 1981 film, its interior a masterclass in the hostile English welcome: low ceilings, a darts game that stops mid-throw when strangers enter, a stuffed wolf's head on the wall, and a pentagram chalked on the floor that nobody in the village appears to find unusual.

The locals know something is wrong on the moors. They have simply elected not to tell visitors, as is traditional.

The Slaughtered Lamb earns its place here because it codified something real about a certain kind of British pub: the one that does not want you in it. I found quite a few of them in the early 1980s when my purple mohawk was apparently “not allowed in here”.

Every village and most towns in England have one. Landis simply made explicit what was already there. The film uses the pub as shorthand for an entire social architecture: the place that knows the rules, does not explain them, and watches you break them with a mixture of contempt, pity and mild interest.

No relation to the Venice Harry's, despite sharing a name, an era, and the affections of Ernest Hemingway. Harry's New York Bar on the Rue Daunou opened in 1911, transplanted wholesale from a Manhattan saloon by a Scottish-American jockey called Tod Sloan, who shipped the entire mahogany interior across the Atlantic. It became the headquarters of the Lost Generation in the 1920s: Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Humphrey Bogart, and Cole Porter, who is said to have written “I Love Paris” on the piano in the downstairs bar, which has been called the Sank Roo Doe Noo ever since, a phonetic rendering of its address yelled at taxi drivers.

Harry's is credited with inventing the Bloody Mary, the White Lady, the French 75, and the Sidecar, which is either an extraordinary run of cocktail creativity or a sign that the bar's contribution to drinks history has been somewhat aggressively curated over the decades. Either way, the Bloody Mary alone would be enough. It is among the most ordered cocktails in the world and its origin story begins here, with a bartender called Fernand Petiot in the 1920s, mixing vodka and tomato juice for a room full of people who had, by all accounts, already had quite enough.

Tolkien's inn at Bree is the first tavern in fantasy literature to feel like an actual pub: smoky, crowded, full of people minding their own business and suspicious of anyone who doesn't. Frodo and his companions arrive in The Fellowship of the Ring, fall into conversation with a ranger who turns out to be the heir to the throne of Gondor, Frodo accidentally puts on the One Ring and disappears in front of the entire common room, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you drink on an empty stomach in an unfamiliar town.

The Prancing Pony matters because Tolkien understood what a good pub is. It is not a destination; it is a hinge. The world of Middle-earth becomes navigable partly because it contains recognisable human institutions: roads, meals, and inns where strangers meet and things begin. Tolkien based the Pony on the rural English pubs of his own experience, and the result is the most detailed imaginary drinking establishment in literature: you can picture the layout, the fire, the landlord Barliman Butterbur, who means well but cannot quite keep up.

It established the template for the fantasy tavern that every subsequent writer in the genre has been working from ever since.

This was a tough one as there are so many fictional boozers to choose from (and I’m not really a Harry Potter fan!)

A reasonable case could be made for Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe from Douglas Adams, which serves Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters and exists outside of time.

A case could also be made for the Rovers Return, the Queen Vic, or the Woolpack, each of which has shaped how British people understand the pub as a social institution across several television-watching generations.

The Leaky Cauldron wins because it introduced the idea of the hidden pub to an entire generation. Tucked away on Charing Cross Road and quietly ignored by Muggles, it functions as the threshold between the ordinary world and the magical one.

You pass through a bar to get to the place you actually want to be, which may be the most honest description of pubs ever written, even if J.K. Rowling didn’t mean it that way.

Tom the barman is less a character than a fixture, as the best barmen are.

The Leaky Cauldron has done more to make an entire generation romantically attached to the idea of a dark, slightly grubby, magical British pub (sounds like my old local in Epsom) than any amount of heritage tourism. That counts for something.

Same again?

Ten bars, spanning eleven centuries, four countries, and at least two planes of existence. What connects them is not the quality of their cellar or the size of their wine list. It is the fact that something happened in them that would not have happened anywhere else: a poem was written, a cocktail was invented, a philosophy was argued into shape, a stranger was refused service. The bar at its best is not a passive backdrop. It is the room that makes the thing possible.

The best bars you have ever been in probably did not make this list. They are too specific to you, and this is my list. They’re too tied to a particular evening, a particular company, a particular conversation that ran until someone noticed the staff were mopping the floor around you.

That is rather the point. The bar is the only institution in the world that treats the history of ideas and the history of last Tuesday night with equal seriousness.

Chaucer knew it. Hemingway knew it. So did whoever first pulled a pint for a crusader under Nottingham Castle. The rest of us are still catching up.

Same again?