Spin: Mexico City. Find: An unmarked door, a synchronized welcome, two floors of theatrical brilliance, and the most joyful bar team on earth.
THE SPIN
Mexico City was the destination. Handshake had been on the list long enough to feel like unfinished business — the World’s Best Bar in 2024, currently sitting at #2, tucked behind an unmarked door in Colonia Juárez like it has absolutely nothing to prove.
It doesn’t. But it shows up anyway.
THE BET
Door 13. No sign, no fanfare, no indication from the outside that what’s behind it is anything other than a wall.
And then you open it.
Theatrical curtains part and the entire team delivers a synchronized welcome — every single person, in unison, as though they’ve been waiting specifically for you. Which, in a way, they have. The room is Great Gatsby meets prohibition era — low lighting, dark hues, glowing brass, the kind of noir glamour that makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a film that’s been running since the 1920s and simply hasn’t stopped. A 90s soundtrack hums underneath everything, which shouldn’t work as well as it does and works completely.
Just 32 seats. Intimate, hushed, theatrical. The kind of room that makes the outside world feel very far away very quickly.
And that’s just upstairs.
THE ODDS
What makes Handshake worth the spin — beyond the ranking, beyond the door, beyond the synchronized welcome that gets you every single time — is that it earns its place at the top of the world with genuine, joyful, obsessive craft.
Cocktails prepared with a culinary approach, some taking 24 to 48 hours to make — infused, clarified, layered with precision that makes the results feel inevitable rather than effortful. The clarified piña colada arrives refreshing rather than sweet and heavy, which sounds like a small thing until you realize it rewrites everything you thought you knew about the drink. Every glass feels like a story only this team could tell.
And the team is the thing. Every member is a bartender — rotating roles weekly, working prep, maître, till — which means the hospitality is built in rather than performed. The warmth is structural. The joy is Rodrigo’s, radiating outward through everyone around him, and you feel it in every interaction from the moment the curtains part.
Downstairs is a different world entirely — more up-tempo, hip hop soundtrack, the energy looser and louder and just as precise. Where upstairs is a production, downstairs is a party. Both are essential. Neither is optional.
THE HAND
The Fig Martini — on the menu since Handshake opened, iconic for a reason, the kind of drink that tells you immediately what this bar believes and delivers on every word of it.
The Three Sips Martini, presented like a floral bouquet — whimsical, precise, completely Handshake in its DNA.
And the clarified piña colada, because you think you know what it is and you don’t, and that surprise is the whole point.
Start upstairs. Finish downstairs. Let the night develop on its own terms.
THE PASSPORT ROULETTE VERDICT 🎰
The world’s #2 bar is behind an unmarked door in Mexico City and turns every single night into a full production — synchronized welcome, two floors, two worlds, cocktails that take two days to make and disappear in the best possible way.
Knock on door 13. Open the curtains. Let the team take it from there.
They’ve been waiting for you.
Handshake Speakeasy is located at C. Amberes 65, Juárez, Cuauhtémoc, 06600 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
