Clemente Bar

Clemente Bar opened in October 2024 on the second floor of Eleven Madison Park, Daniel Humm's three-Michelin-star restaurant at Madison Avenue and East 24th Street, and it is the most decorated room in this guide. It entered North America's 50 Best Bars at number 11 in 2025, taking the Best New Opening Award, and ranked number 15 in 2026.

It is named for the Italian artist Francesco Clemente, who made the original murals that run through the room and around the back bar — a collaboration rather than a decorative commission. The space divides into a 38-seat Lounge serving à la carte food and drinks and a nine-seat Studio offering a five-course tasting with cocktail pairings. As at Eleven Madison Park, the food is entirely plant-based.

What earns it a place here is that the non-alcoholic drinking is treated as a first-class programme rather than an accommodation. The bar runs a dedicated menu of "soft cocktails", and — the detail that matters most — the Studio tasting menu can be taken with a fully non-alcoholic pairing. A pairing is a much harder thing to build than a good individual drink: it has to carry a five-course meal, change register between courses, and hold its own against a kitchen operating at three-star level. Very few restaurants anywhere attempt it seriously. Named zero-proof drinks include the Proxy Fizz, built on Seedlip Garden with cucumber, green apple and amazake, and a non-alcoholic Kalimotxo.

The honest caveat is straightforward: Clemente Bar serves alcohol, and it is an expensive, formal room that requires planning. It is not a casual alternative to a local bar and it is not an alcohol-free space.

What it is, instead, is proof of a specific point this directory keeps making. The most common assumption about not drinking is that it means accepting a lesser version of the evening. A bar ranked among the best on the continent, attached to one of the best restaurants in the world, which will construct a full non-alcoholic pairing for a tasting menu, is the clearest available evidence that this is a choice about what is in the glass rather than a downgrade of the occasion. For a special evening in New York where someone at the table is not drinking, there is nothing better in the city.