Best Cocktail Bars — Nashville 2025

Nashville has bars. It has very few places that can make a proper drink. These are those places.

The bar program in this city is full of theater. Great-looking rooms, clever menus, drinks that photograph well and taste like sugar water. Cocktail bars are easy to open and hard to run well — balance is unforgiving, and most places never figure it out. The Patterson House has been the standard for long enough that it shouldn't be a surprise anymore, and it still surprises people. Attaboy doesn't have a menu. You tell them what you're in the mood for and they make it. That either sounds annoying or exactly right, depending on who you are. Either way, the drink lands. This list is short because the bar is high. If something earns its way on, it'll be here.

The Patterson House

The Gulch
$$$
Cocktail Bar
Delicious

The Patterson House is Nashville's original serious cocktail bar — now in a new location in The Gulch, with seasonal menus, hand-cut ice, no standing policy, and the bartenders who changed what Nashville thought a cocktail bar could be.

the-patterson-house

Attaboy

East Nashville
$$
Cocktail Bar
Damn Good

Attaboy Nashville is East Nashville's most serious cocktail bar — no printed menu, no signatures, just a bartender asking what you like and building something worth drinking. The Nashville outpost of the legendary New York original, doing exactly what made the concept famous.

attaboy-nashville