A Look Inside 7 Secret Highend Hotel Bars and How to Get In

travelandleisure.com
April 12, 2025 - Full Article

Nearly a century after the end of Prohibition, the allure of the speakeasy endures—particularly at high-end hotels, where today’s bragging rights are all about knowing the hidden drinking spots.

Somewhere in Butcher & Still, the stylish steak house at the Four Seasons Hotel Abu Dhabi at Al Maryah Island, a hidden elevator leads to the Hideaway, a secret room two levels below. Inside, diners sip Prohibition-style cocktails surrounded by cabinets and display cases filled with objects inspired by the era, including lavish fur coats and jewelry. The only way to find the space, which is available solely for buyouts, is with the help of a hotel employee.

The Hideaway is representative of a new generation of speakeasies and similarly covert cocktail corners being created by some of the world’s leading hotels. And, by all accounts, travelers are increasingly looking to discover them. “It used to be about the Instagrammable moments at hotels, but now people want to do what no one else is doing and go to places no one else has,” says Tania Swasbrook, a travel advisor and cofounder of the agency Vgari.The cover has been blown on some, such as London’s Spy Bar, a subterranean storage room turned classified drinking spot inside the Raffles London at the OWO. Once the sole purview of those in the know, it now turns up on Google—and the hotel’s own website. Then there’s Charles H., which is tucked away in the basement of the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul and made the 2021 World’s 50 Best Bars list.

Yet plenty of hush-hush spots remain hard to find: this kind of detail is the coin of the realm among concierges, butlers, and well-connected travel advisors. “It’s the ones you can’t find online that hark back to the origin of the speakeasy,” Swasbrook says. 

Double O Seven cocktail at the Spy Bar, in the Raffles London at the OWO. Photo: Courtesy of The Spy Bar