Inside Palm Beach’s Best Bars, Where Old Glamour Never Goes Out of Style

Palm Beach has built its reputation on glamour, the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself. It’s a town of manicured hedges, old family fortunes, and a level of polish that reads as effortless because it’s had decades to perfect it. That same sensibility carries straight through to how the island drinks. The best rooms are a small handful, mostly tucked inside hotels that have outlasted several decades of trends, where the bartender knows your name and the crowd hasn’t changed much since the Kennedy era. Here’s where that crowd is actually drinking in 2026.

Mary Lou’s Palm Beach

Photo Credit: Mary Lou’s Palm Beach

Mary Lou’s flagship location transformed the historic Berto’s Bait and Tackle into a refined cocktail lounge built around the golden era of 1970s and ’80s Palm Beach opulence. Named for Mary Lou Curtis, the late grandmother of co-founder Alex Melillo, the space blends vintage charm with a sophisticated, slightly hedonistic edge, velvet-toned, reservation-required, and built for a late night. The cocktail program is the headline, backed by a cheeky late-night menu of fried chicken bites, an A5 wagyu “Big Mac,” and Umberto’s famous grandma pizza. Right at 12:03 AM, as the DJ hits his stride and the disco ball catches the room’s leopard print and burgundy banquettes, a plate of just-baked chocolate chip cookies makes its way through the crowd, a genuinely grandmotherly gesture in a room otherwise built for bass and late-night hedonism, and a nod straight back to the concept’s namesake. The concept has since expanded to Montauk and Miami, but the Palm Beach original remains the one that started it.

Swifty’s at The Colony Hotel

Swifty’s carries a genuine New York pedigree, transplanted from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to a poolside perch beneath The Colony Hotel’s twinkling hanging garden. The clubby indoor bar and lounge, run by original proprietor Robert Caravaggi, pairs a specialty cocktail list with live music and an atmosphere regulars describe as a club without the dues. Monday night trivia and a fashionable, unmistakably Palm Beach crowd make it one of the few bars on the island that feels social rather than simply decorative.

The Palm Bar at Palm House

Photo Credit: Palm House

Palm House spent nearly two decades sitting vacant on a prime stretch of oceanfront real estate before reopening in 2024 as the first U.S. property for London-based L+R Hotels’ Iconic Luxury Hotels collection, and its lobby bar has quickly become one of the island’s most photographed rooms. Anchored by a glowing pink marble bar top beneath hand-blown Murano glass chandeliers, Palm Bar pairs white-jacketed bartenders and tuxedo service with inventive cocktails and well-executed classics, all steps from the hotel’s entrance by design, guests are meant to hand off their keys and unwind immediately. Live music runs every Thursday, and the bar sits beside The Dining Room at Palm House, a Nobu-created Japanese Peruvian menu that’s made the whole property one of the island’s newest, and most talked-about, arrivals.

Cucina Palm Beach

Cucina bills itself as Palm Beach’s original Dinner to Disco party, and it delivers on that promise more literally than almost anywhere else on the island. Chef Kent Thurston’s Italian-American menu of handmade pizzas and pastas carries the early evening, but the room shifts after dinner service into a late-night bar with a DJ spinning until 2 or 3 AM, dancing included. It’s the rare Palm Beach spot that stays loud past midnight, a genuine outlier on an island that otherwise tends to wind down early.

LoLa 41

LoLa 41 takes its name and its menu concept from the 41st parallel, the latitude line the restaurant sits on, pulling flavors from every country and region it crosses. The bar leans into that global framing with a happy hour running daily from 3 to 6 PM, sushi, gourmet burgers, and cocktails like a house-made banana-infused bourbon served in a large indoor-outdoor bar setup. It’s a looser, more playful stop than most of the island’s other bars, and one of the few with a genuinely international drink and food menu to match.

The Vineta Hotel

Palm Beach’s most significant nightlife story in years didn’t come from a new bar opening. It came from an old one closing. The Chesterfield Hotel, and its long-running Leopard Lounge, closed for a full renovation and reopened in March 2026 as the Vineta Hotel, the first U.S. property for Oetker Hotels, the European luxury group behind Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. The Vineta’s ground floor now houses four separate dining and entertainment concepts, developed by Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi, reviving the address’s Mediterranean Revival architecture while giving Palm Beach an entirely new set of rooms to discover. Early word suggests the team is working to honor the Leopard Lounge’s legacy without simply recreating it, worth watching as the space settles into its new identity through the rest of 2026.