How The World's 50 Best Bars In North America Keep Guests Hooked
Kevin Diedrich Co-Founder of Pacific Cocktail Haven in San Francisco
Which means that each location ultimately succeeds by tapping into an authentic form of guest interaction that respects the inherent relationship between bartender and guest. The recently revealed North America's 50 Best Bars of 2025 may span the continent but they all have one thing in common, their clientele. With rising food and beverage costs and stiff competition, guests have become more discerning than ever. Which means that bars have never had more opportunity to create the ultimate guest experience with locals, regulars and one-off visitors alike. 'We've pretty well always said that the pretentious bartender thing is dead.' Says Amber Bruce, beverage director for The Keefer Bar an institution that has been going strong for 15 years in Vancouver's Chinatown. 'Check your ego at the door. Welcome people like it's your own living room. We have an amazing crew who've been with us for years. Your section becomes your own bar basically.'
Library by the Sea from Grand Cayman
Library by the Sea, located on 7-mile beach in Grand Cayman, is a cocktail destination within a vacation destination and head bartender Max Wolff notes that even their elevated and integrated story-themed drinks sometimes come second to their unique relationship to the guests. 'We find that we might not have regulars every day of the year but we have them for their stay. We get to know them much more intimately than you'd get to know them in a bar in the neighborhood. We see them at breakfast, meet the kids. Sneak the kids some gelato and get them to go play in the pool while the parents have cocktails with us.'
The team from The Keefer Bar in Vancouver
Different establishments lean into different approaches to hospitality but for Diedrich's PCH, his own experience and attention to detail has paid off. 'When we first opened we were just supposed to be a neighborhood cocktail bar and now we're this high end destination bar.' Diedrich, who implemented a monogrammed coaster program for regulars, explains. 'We jokingly say that the hardest thing to learn isn't the drinks it's knowing all 200 regulars and their initials and their partner's initials.'
Jewel of the South in New Orleans
'I pride myself on the concierge style of helping the guests along with their stay.' Says Chris Hannah, bartender and co-owner of Jewel of the South, who keeps it old school in his approach to guest experience based on his own background at NOLA classic, Arnaud's. 'We make sure that they go see some of our friends because our competition is a healthy competition in New Orleans. We want to make sure that while they're there they are going to someplace where we know that our friends are going to take care of them as well.'
Kaito del Valle from Mexico City is a Mexican and Japanese-based Izakaya that focuses on sake-based cocktails but with Mexican ingredients. While the cocktails are complex, the path to great hospitality of any best bar is simple. 'We opened nine years ago and it's a full female staffed bar.' Clauda Cabrero says of what she calls the super nerdy, funky and relaxed spot. 'It just sort of happened. I didn't plan it like that. I thought it was going to be fun. It's really fun.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Delta, United sued for selling windowless 'window seats'
By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) -Delta Air Lines and United Airlines were sued on Tuesday by passengers who claimed they paid extra money to sit in "window" seats, only to find themselves placed in seats next to a blank wall. Proposed class actions were filed against United in San Francisco federal court and against Delta in Brooklyn, New York federal court, seeking millions of dollars of damages for more than 1 million passengers at each carrier. The complaints say some Boeing 737, Boeing 757 and Airbus A321 planes contain seats that would normally contain windows, but lack them because of the placement of air conditioning ducts, electrical conduits or other components. Passengers said Delta and United do not flag these seats during the booking process, unlike rivals such as Alaska Airlines and American Airlines, even when charging tens or occasionally hundreds of dollars for them. The lawsuits say people buy window seats for several reasons including to address fear of flying or motion sickness, keep a child occupied, get extra light or watch the world go by. "Had plaintiffs and the class members known that the seats they were purchasing (were) windowless, they would not have selected them — much less have paid extra," the United complaint said. The Delta complaint contained similar language. Delta is based in Atlanta, and United in Chicago. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment. Ancillary revenue from seat selection, baggage fees, cabin upgrades, airport lounges and other services help carriers generate more cash when they fly while keeping base fares lower. The Delta lawsuit is led by Nicholas Meyer of Brooklyn, and the United lawsuit is led by Marc Brenman of San Francisco and Aviva Copaken of Los Angeles. Copaken said United refunded fees for her windowless seats on two flights, but not a third. Passengers can use websites such as SeatGuru to find pluses and minuses of specific seats, including those lacking windows. Carter Greenbaum, a lawyer whose firm filed the two lawsuits, said the ability to find information from third party websites doesn't excuse Delta's and United's conduct. "A company can't misrepresent the nature of the products it sells and then rely on third party reviews to say a customer should have known that it was lying," he said in an email. The cases are Meyer v Delta Air Lines Inc, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 25-04608; and Brenman et al v United Airlines Inc, U.S. District Court, Northern District of San Francisco, No. 25-06995. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Journals
2 hours ago
- Business Journals
Bay Area's 'Basic Instinct' home returns to the market with $91 million price tag
A former CEO's coastal estate in Carmel Highlands, once featured in the 1992 San Francisco-set film "Basic Instinct," is back on the market, this time with renovations and expanded acreage.
Forbes
2 hours ago
- Forbes
The Prompt: Sam Altman Escalates Rivalry With Elon Musk
Welcome back to The Prompt. Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California, back when they were still friends. (Photo byfor Vanity Fair) Two of the most prominent names in AI, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have been at odds with each other for a while now. From lawsuits (and counterlawsuits) to scathing social media posts, the rivalry of the two Silicon Valley heavyweights has been quite apparent. While their respective companies— OpenAI and xAI— battle it out head to head as competitors, Altman has been developing products and investing in companies that directly compete with many of Musk's businesses, Forbes reported. Altman is backing brain computer interface startup and Neuralink rival Merge Labs. He recently shared his aspirations for an AI-powered social media platform that would directly compete with X. The billionaire CEO is also going after the self-driving market by partnering with Applied Intuition and has invested in a SpaceX competitor that aims to (literally) shoot satellites into orbit with a gigantic gun. Let's get into the headlines. BIG PLAYS Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the U.S. due to national security concerns over its Chinese parent company Bytedance. It's still on people's phones, though, because President Trump has told the Department of Justice to suspend enforcement of the law as terms of a sale to a U.S. company are brokered. Now under a hiatus from regulatory scrutiny, Bytedance has continued to ship a scurry of AI apps ranging from an AI coding tool to image and music generators, Forbes reported. ETHICS+ LAW Meta has permitted its AI chatbots to 'engage a child in a conversation that's romantic or sensual,' according to an internal document that lays out rules of how its bots should interact with people, Reuters reported. The Facebook and Instagram-owner also allows its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, to generate and supply false information, create violent imagery of elders and children and spin up content that argues that 'Black people are dumber than white people.' In response to the report, Meta removed portions of its policies that allowed its chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children. TALENT SHUFFLING Meta has experienced a significant churn among its top-tier AI talent, largely due to a chaotic culture within its generative AI team and a lack of vision, multiple ex-Meta AI researchers told Forbes . The tech giant continues to lose talent, despite a recruiting blitz that has seen it poach talent from OpenAI and other AI juggernauts for its all-star superintelligence team. (A recent example— Joelle Pineau, former VP of AI research at Meta joined Cohere as its Chief AI Officer.) The company's AI arm, which started with the creation of FAIR, has gone through a series of reorganizations. Now with its fresh set of hires that includes ex-Scale AI CEO Alex Wang, Meta reportedly plans yet another shake-up by splitting its current AI division into four parts. AI DEAL OF THE WEEK Enterprise-focused AI startup Cohere has raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. The Canadian startup, which was an early entrant to the generative AI space, recently launched a software offering called North that helps use different large language models to quickly create customized AI systems and automate specific tasks across functions like HR and marketing. Unlike other startups that are chasing the still relatively undefined goal of achieving AGI (an AI system that rivals human intelligence), Cohere is focused on how AI can best be used to increase productivity, Cohere cofounder Nick Frosst told me last week. Plus: Pylon, which is an AI-based customer support system for B2B companies, has raised $31 million in funding co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. DEEP DIVE Earlier this year, Scott Rasmussen, the longtime pollster and political commentator, traveled to Bowling Green, Kentucky. After he toured the city, about 65 miles north of Nashville, he returned with a novel idea: use AI to transform polling, a notoriously fickle and imprecise discipline that he had studied for decades. To pursue the project, he teamed up with an unlikely partner — Google. Rasmussen had visited Bowling Green to check out the work of Jigsaw, a think tank inside Google that tackles big societal challenges like online extremism. At the time, it was working with the Kentucky city's local government on an experiment aimed at jumpstarting civic engagement. Jigsaw asked residents to answer questions about the issues they cared most about, from the potential arrival of a Dave & Buster's to the debate over marijuana legalization. From there, it would use a Google AI tool called Sensemaker, built from its language model Gemini, to analyze the answers and separate the residents' disagreements from where they had common ground. The problem with traditional polls, he said, is that closed-ended questions empower the asker to frame or tilt the discussion with yes or no answers, a binary that reduces nuance. 'When you begin to ask people the questions in a different way — or begin to address their opinions in a different way — you hear things you never thought to ask,' he said. The result is an ambitious project: As the United States turns 250-years-old next July, Jigsaw partnered with Rasmussen's Napolitan Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the future of polling and analysis, on an initiative to use AI in a similar fashion to poll Americans about the future of the country. The project, called We The People, Google exclusively told Forbes , will gather five to 10 people each from all 435 congressional districts in the U.S. to answer questions about what it means to be an American, the most urgent issues facing the country, and where the nation might go from here. 'We want to use AI to give people voice and choice in the world around them,' Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw and a 19-year veteran of Google, told Forbes . 'If people don't feel that they have a voice, or their voice matters to their policymaker, they don't feel that they are enfranchised or have agency.' Read the full story on Forbes . MODEL BEHAVIOR As the AI race heats up, developers and enthusiasts are gambling on which AI model is most likely to come out on top as the 'best AI model of the month,' the Wall Street Journal reported. Some are already minting money by betting against the success of certain model launches like GPT-5 and making hundreds of trades through sites like Kalshi and Polymarket, where people can bet on predictions of real world events.
