Belly-up at the best watering holes in town

A decade ago, while walking through the lobby of a posh five-star hotel in Hamburg, a jet-setting executive wondered whether or not the lifeless hotel bar was actually closed. The space was filled with threadbare furnishings, frayed oriental rugs and a creepy flickering antediluvian lamp, giving it “the eerie air of a funeral parlor,” he recalls, many years later. “Plus, the bartender looked like a holdover from the Depression Era. It was horrible.”

The bleak bar, of course, wasn’t closed. But it should’ve been, insists the high-flying executive who never returned to the stodgy property. It’s a make-it or break-it scenario shared by many in his coterie, for whom a drink, a meet-and-greet or just solitary reflection in an atmospheric space is as central to their on-the-go lives as their Blackberrys.

Which is exactly why, in the past few years, hotel bars have undergone a slow but steady broad-based transformation. Says Bjorn Hanson, a hospitality consultant and researcher with PricewaterhouseCoopers, “Hotels have already done flat-screen TVs and improved beddings, so the new frontier is the creative and competitive element of bars.”