Ballet in a Glass, Dalí on Rice Paper: The World’s Most Creative Cocktail Bars Are Turning Drinks Into Art

A ballerina just danced a Negroni. I’m not being poetic. On September 27, inside Sentralen, a grand old bank hall in central Oslo, dancers from the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet performed thirteen original works, one for every cocktail on Himkok’s new menu: the beetroot Negroni became a smoldering red duet, the rhubarb French 75 a burst of giddy footwork, the apple Old Fashioned a full-company finale. It’s the boldest proof yet that the world’s most creative cocktail bars have stopped simply making drinks and started making art, from Dalí printed on edible rice paper at Paradiso and cocktails served in cast-metal cupped hands at Sips in Barcelona to Gerald Scarfe’s caricatures at Rosewood London’s Scarfes Bar, Hong Kong’s neon at DarkSide and a pop-up at Art Week Tokyo this November where the artists themselves design the drinks.

Museums, consider yourselves on notice.

These aren’t flower-on-the-rim gimmicks. They’re menus built with painters, sculptors, illustrators, glassblowers, photographers and choreographers, and several of them ask you to walk over to an actual artwork, study it and then order its liquid interpretation. Here are the bars doing it best right now, plus a few recent projects worth knowing about even though the menus have moved on.

Himkok

Storgata 27, Oslo

Himkok, the Oslo institution that has spent a decade defining Scandinavian cocktail culture (and a regular on the World’s 50 Best Bars list), marked its new menu by commissioning an actual ballet. Himkok x Movement was conceived and choreographed by Anaïs Touret with creative lead Jens Carlos Schwartz, danced by artists of the Norwegian National Ballet with Norwegian singer ARY, set to thirteen original compositions by Sebastian Schmiedl (who also designed the lighting) and costumed by Julianne Johnsen.

Touret started with flavor, texture, color and mood and translated each into movement. Beetroot, the bar’s Nordic Negroni with coffee notes and bitter botanicals, became a red-costumed duet. Raspberry, a Ramos-style fizz, got soft, airy choreography to match. Rhubarb, an aquavit French 75, went light and quick. Apple, an Old Fashioned built on Hardangerfjord apples, bourbon and cinnamon, closed the show with the full company.

The ballet was a one-night affair, but the thirteen cocktails are on the menu now. No, a dancer will not pirouette to your table. Watch the performance clips before you sip anyway.

Haute Living take: The most ambitious menu launch I’ve ever seen. Somebody give this bar a Tony.

Paradiso

Carrer de Rera Palau 4, Barcelona

Paradiso, Giacomo Giannotti’s speakeasy hidden behind a pastrami shop in El Born (and a former World’s Best Bar), leans fully into Catalonia’s surrealist inheritance with its current Oltre menu. The standout is Piccolo e Grande, developed with Food Lab Barcelona and inspired by Dalí’s The Elephants: gin, elderflower liqueur, Campari, manzanilla sherry, fig-leaf soda and clarified grapefruit, served in a hand-blown vessel wrapped in edible rice paper printed with the painting’s spindly-legged beasts.

Yes, you’re encouraged to eat part of the artwork. Dalí would have insisted.

Haute Living take: Surrealism you can sip. The perfect nightcap after the Picasso Museum.

Sips

Carrer de Muntaner 108, Barcelona

Sips, from Simone Caporale and Marc Álvarez, treats glassware as seriously as spirits, working with local artisans on one-off vessels. The one to order is Primordial: Scotch, ruby port and nashi pear, served in a metal cast of two cupped hands.

The idea is beautifully simple (before glasses, we drank from our hands), and it’s astonishing how much a vessel can change the act of drinking. You hold it differently. You slow down. You think about it, which is the whole point.

Haute Living take: A sculpture you drink from. The best argument for a second Barcelona bar crawl.

Scarfes Bar

Rosewood London, 252 High Holborn

Scarfes Bar at Rosewood London has always been soaked in the wit of the caricaturist Gerald Scarfe, whose drawings line its walls. Its current Heroes & Villains menu puts that mischief directly into your hands: twenty cocktails, two for each of ten famous figures, revealed through an illustrated menu with hidden pull-outs.

Paul McCartney gets Strawberry Fields Forever (a Paloma riff with tequila, strawberry and verbena) and Man on the Run (a rum Ramos fizz with peach and coconut). Oscar Wilde gets a Martini variation called High Society and a mezcal Spicy Margarita called Temptation, which feels about right. The menu even pokes fun at the drinks industry itself, the techniques bartenders worship and the cocktails they pretend to be above. Self-awareness is very attractive in a bar.

Arriving early? Rosewood’s Mirror Room serves a Monet-inspired Art Afternoon Tea, with pastries interpreting his paintings and optional cocktails named Springtime, Regatta and The Cliffs.

Haute Living take: Clever, cheeky and dangerously easy to order both versions of everyone.

Lennon’s

Rosewood Bangkok

Lennon’s, the sky-high bar at Rosewood Bangkok, is modeled on a home recording studio and houses more than 6,000 vinyl records. Its Bangkok Beats menu brings Thai ingredients into the studio: gin with coconut oil, mango and marian plum; bourbon with peanut butter, tamarind, calamansi and lime.

Pick a record, order a drink and let the night play out.

Haute Living take: The most beautifully soundtracked bar in Asia. Bring requests.

Photo Credit: Charlie McKay

The Lobby Bar at One Aldwych

One Aldwych, London

One Aldwych owns roughly 400 contemporary artworks, and the Lobby Bar’s Gallery menu, now in its second edition with cocktail consultant Marcis Dzelzainis, turns the collection into a drinks list. Each cocktail is paired with a specific piece and tells you where in the hotel to find it.

André Wallace’s bronze The Boatman inspires a Horseradish Martini (vodka, horseradish distillate, coastal dry vermouth, onion pickle juice), as bracing as the sculpture is commanding. Philip Diggle’s portrait of Michel Foucault inspires the Raspberry Enzoni, with gin, Campari, raspberry eau de vie and lemon; Diggle, fittingly, used to paint live onstage at his brother Steve’s Buzzcocks gigs.

Haute Living take: A self-guided art tour with table service. Museums, take notes.

Bacchanalia

Mayfair, London

Bacchanalia is already one of London’s most over-the-top rooms, all frescoes, marble and sculpture, and its new Palette cocktail collection, shared with sister venue Apollo’s Muse, turns that décor into drinks. The menu arrives as a magazine. Mosaic mixes gin, blanco tequila, basil, apricot and spice; Rosso Levanto channels burgundy marble through tequila clarified with blackcurrant, prune and pomegranate; Emerald goes green with gin, apple, cucumber, fig leaf and Prosecco.

It’s an excuse to look up from your glass and really see the room. As if you needed one.

Haute Living take: For anyone who has fallen for a room before opening the menu. Guilty.

A Bar With Shapes for a Name

Haggerston, London

Rémy Savage and Paul Lougrat’s East London bar (yes, that’s genuinely its name) approaches cocktails through Bauhaus principles: form, function and the purpose of every element. Kazimir, after Malevich’s White on White, is a stripped-back trio of vodka, peach yogurt and absinthe. The Piña Colada, after Paul Klee’s Joyful Garden, distills fresh pineapple for aroma, rebuilds its flavor with verjus and acids, swaps cream for coconut water and adds an Earl Grey infusion to the rum.

It’s a lot of thinking. The drinking, thankfully, is effortless.

Haute Living take: Art-school rigor, zero pretension. The best kind of nerdy.

DarkSide

Rosewood Hong Kong, Victoria Dockside

DarkSide at Rosewood Hong Kong built its Echoes menu around the city’s makers. All Eyes on Me, developed with Neon Dept, interprets Hong Kong’s disappearing neon signs through tropical fruit, herbal brightness and bitterness. The Dragon’s Beat takes its cue from Gi Ceramics with berries and spice, and Chic & Candied nods to Brothers Leathercraft with citrus, pandan and candied notes.

Every drink comes with a name you can go find the next day, which turns a great night out into a better itinerary.

Haute Living take: A love letter to Hong Kong craftsmanship, with ice.

Trick Dog

3010 20th Street, San Francisco

Trick Dog has treated every menu as a creative project since it opened in the Mission, and earlier this year it outdid itself. Meet Me in the City was a 64-page hardcover photography book with 89 images and sixteen cocktails responding to local photographers’ visions of San Francisco. Golden City, tied to photographer Mimi Plumb, used plum three ways (eau de vie, wine and vinegar) with whiskey and bay leaf.

That menu has since given way to a wrestling-themed one (because of course it has), but the book lives on as a collectible. The drinks disappear; a beautiful book stays on your shelf.

Haute Living take: The bar that makes menus worth stealing. Buy the book instead.

Photo Credit: Photo by Chrzi

Mirror Bar

Radisson Blu Carlton Hotel, Bratislava

Mirror Bar, inside Bratislava’s grand Radisson Blu Carlton Hotel, organizes its menu into three chapters: Classy, Art and Nature. The Art section works as the bar’s gallery, pairing inventive drinks with striking bespoke glassware, while Nature serves cocktails nestled in botanical arrangements by Botanical Lab.

Bratislava rarely makes the European cocktail circuit. This is a very good reason to change that.

Haute Living take: One of the most interesting bars on this list.

The St. Regis Bar

The St. Regis Bangkok

The St. Regis Bar in Bangkok (a brand born in New York, remember) looks back home with Portraits of Manhattan, which interprets eight neighborhoods through cocktails, commissioned paintings and a curated soundtrack. It’s a surprisingly transporting way to spend an evening, sipping the West Village while the Bangkok skyline glitters outside.

Ideal for anyone who misses New York. Which is everyone who’s ever left.

Haute Living take: Manhattan with a Thai accent. I’ll take two.

Slow Barcelona

Carrer de París 186, Barcelona

Slow Barcelona’s Artists Only collection, now in the bar’s menu archive, deserves a mention for sheer ambition. Diego Latina interpreted sixteen artworks in liquid form, from Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and David’s Death of Marat to Dalí, Klimt, Picasso, Pollock and Basquiat.

You can’t order the full lineup today, so go for the bar and let the archive tell you what it’s capable of.

Haute Living take: An art-history degree, served on the rocks. Sadly, retired.

The London Art Bar

London

The London Art Bar hands you the brush. Its painting events come with themed cocktails, like Starry Night (gin, raspberry and rose soda, and color-changing butterfly pea extract) and Klimt’s Blush (vodka and ginger ale topped with pinot blush and a glittering orange garnish). Drinks change event to event.

Whether your canvas deserves wall space is a question best answered the next morning.

Haute Living take: Paint-and-sip for grown-ups. Surprisingly fun.

AWT Bar

Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo

AWT Bar, the pop-up bar at Art Week Tokyo, makes the connection literal: the artists design the drinks. From November 4 to 8, 2026, in Minami-Aoyama, Mariko Mori’s All That Shines interprets the worldview behind her Mori Art Museum retrospective with soft spheres and gold leaf. Natsumi Aoyagi’s Caipirinha of Five Soaps looks like soap suds and tastes like a bright caipirinha, and Yoshihiro Suda’s Part-Time Job pairs cider with a whisky spray, a wink at his early illustration work for drinks brands.

If you’re in Tokyo for the art, this is the most intimate way to meet it.

Haute Living take: The only bar on this list where the artist takes your order. Book the flight.

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