21 Best Bars in Roma, Mexico City

The glow of flickering candles welcomes visitors to this swish Parisian-style bar that presents live jazz and blues bands several days a week, along with a menu of designer pizzas, Mediterranean tapas, wine, and cocktails. It's a popular spot on weekends, and reservations are recommended if you want a table. Around the corner, sister restaurant Franca Bistro serves a more extensive food menu and has a similarly classy but laid-back air about it.

This grand, cavernous 1940s-era cantina has a long antique bar to one side and a kitchen serving up tasty Asturian Spanish fare. It's filled nightly with the sounds of the tercera edad (a polite phrase for the elder generation) playing exuberant games of dominoes and millennials chatting about their adventures at Roma's latest gallery opening.

At this welcoming, lively Cuban joint set in a grand but faded mansion that wouldn't look the least out of place in Havana, every surface is splashed with graffiti. Inspired by the original Havana establishment where Hemingway once lapped up mojitos, La Bodeguita also serves inexpensive Cuban food and sells Cuban cigars. Much of the time, live salsa, timba, and rumba bands provide entertainment.

Below the popular restaurant Páramo, this lively spot with vaulted brick ceilings offers up one of Roma's most extensive selections of craft beers on tap and by the bottle. Order a flight to sample a few different kinds of ale, which range from aromatic sours to hoppy Pacific Northwest–style IPAs. There's a good selection of gastropub fare as well such as tacos, chili dogs, nachos, and chocolate brownies.

Much-lauded and regularly named among the world's 10 best cocktail bars, Limantour looks nevertheless remarkably approachable—a narrow, neatly designed space with one of the city's first truly serious mixology programs (hence its phenomenal reputation). The surprisingly affordable drinks, like the herbal Green Park (with gin, celery bitters, basil, lime, and egg white) and the Machete (San Cosme mezcal with tangerine liqueur, grapefruit and lime extract, agave syrup, and spearmint), delight the senses and explain why ardent cocktail aficionados flock here. You'll find tasty bar snacks, too.

A small group of French and Mexican friends created this inviting, cosmopolitan bar with a top-flight mixology program that features local botanicals and bitters as well as a house-brand Absinthe distilled in Paris. The relatively short cocktail menu changes weekly but always features some novel creations. There's live jazz, blues, soul, and other music once or twice a week. Downstairs, you'll find sister establishment, Loup Bar, which specializes in natural wines.

Behind the colorfully muraled facade of this wildly popular pulqueria, you'll find three floors to enjoy plain and flavored (blackberry, guayaba, mamey, apricot, mango) versions of the milky millennia-old beverage distilled from the fermented sap of the very agave plants that give us mezcal and tequila. The most popular seating area, especially on warm evenings, is the expansive roof-deck. Top DJs and occasional live bands provide a nice beat to the socializing. And if you're not much for pulque, fear not: there's a full selection of liquor and beer, plus nachos, tacos, burgers, and the like.

Reservations are a good idea, especially on weekends, at this beautiful bar perched on the rooftop of a dapper early 20th-century town house that houses the similarly trendy restaurant Fonico on the ground floor. You can sample the superb, inventive cocktails before deciding on which one you'd like to order. 

This sloppy gem of a loft is part metro stop, part college-dorm commons, part debating society, and part pulquería. It's run by 1950s national lightweight boxing champion and folk hero Epiphanio "Pifas" Leyva, and serves beer and pulque (a drink made with the fermented sap of one type of agave plant) to a young, intellectual crowd that loves to sing and dance to the excellent jukebox of punk and local guacapunk (Mexican ska) classics. If you want a rowdy afternoon (the bar is usually closed by 11, and always closed on Sunday), this is the place. Note that it's technically in the Doctores neighborhood, but borders Colonia Roma.

A favored fixture along the voguey nightlife row that is Avenida Álvaro Obregón, Félix is a popular, dimly lit cocktail bar at first glance. Head down the side hallway to the back, however, and you'll find a chatter-filled garden pizzeria that rakes in sizable crowds until late into the evening—the pies here are pretty tasty, too.

Bright lighting and a bold color scheme create a striking vibe for singing karaoke, watching live bands, dancing, sipping craft cocktails, and nibbling on Japanese-Mexican-fusion bar snacks in this quirky late-night space that draws a mix of artists, club kids, and style-makers. Music tends toward the playful and accessible—think trash disco, alternative, reggae, and pretty much anything that gets the diverse crowd moving. Oriente's two private karaoke rooms are great for small parties (they hold up to 30 guests).

Ensconced within one of the most opulent Porfirian mansions in Roma, this urbane bar is a dramatic setting for well-crafted cocktails and tasty tapas. Located in the mansion's former courtyard, the bar is just one element of the building's rambling series of dining spaces (which also includes an oyster bar and a more formal high-end farm-to-table restaurant), but it's also arguably the most delightful of the venues to pass time in.

In a two-story redbrick brewery on a quiet alley in historic Romita, you can sample some of Mexico City's finest craft brews, from a crisp golden pale ale to a toasty and rich porter. There's a small selection of bar food, and occasionally musicians perform.

Meant to evoke the inviting, laid-back trappings of a friend's (very large) departamento—or apartment—this often packed lounge has DJs spinning trancy tunes on turntables. It's a fun place to chill and mingle before going clubbing, or a place to enjoy while the night is winding down. Some nights there's live music.

You'll find some of the city's most esteemed mixologists slinging drinks in this swanky cocktail bar in a grand old house off Cibeles. The menu changes regularly, but you might try El Viejo Reyes with Ancho Reyes (a poblano and ancho-chile liqueur from Puebla), Siete Misterios Doba-Yej mezcal, Angostura bitters, and flaming orange oil, or Gin Gin's take on a mule with Bombay Sapphire, ginger, yerba buena, cane syrup, lime, and soda. There are tasty food options, too. There are additional locations in Condesa, on the eastern side of Roma Norte, and in Polanco, but this one has the most inviting ambience.

On Roma's northern border with Colonia Juárez, this long and narrow order-at-the-bar beer garden is populated by picnic tables and lushly landscaped, making it surprisingly easy to forget the traffic noise outside (especially if you snag a seat near the back). The beer selection is vast, and you'll find plenty of notable brews from Mexico's up-and-coming artisanal brewers. There's burgers, sandwiches, and other pub fare, too, along with a selection of cocktails.

At this long-standing, high-energy, Friday-only "danceteria," DJs spin 1980s pop classics, disco, and techno while the flamboyant patrons, a fairly even mixture of gays and straights, compete in theatrical dance-offs. Prepare to sweat.