Schmuck lands at No. 11 on the World's 50 Best Bars 2026
The East Village bar also won the Best New Opening award, the highest finish for any New York venue on this year's list.
Schmuck, the East Village bar from Moe Aljaff and Juliette Larrouy, placed No. 11 on the World's 50 Best Bars 2026 and took home the Three Cents Best New Opening Award. The list was unveiled in Milan on October 7, where Hong Kong's Bar Leone kept the global No. 1 spot for a second straight year.
Schmuck's result makes it the highest-ranked bar in New York this year. Three other city venues made the cut: Sip & Guzzle at No. 14, Martiny's at No. 46, and Bar Snack at No. 49. Together they were the only four American bars to reach the top 50, a tally unchanged from 2025 even as the ranking inside it shifted in Schmuck's favour.
The bar opened on 1st Avenue in early 2025 and moved quickly. It debuted at No. 59 on the 2025 51-100 extension list, then jumped more than 40 places in a single year to break into the top 15. Aljaff and Larrouy built the track record first in Barcelona, where their earlier bar, Two Schmucks, reached No. 7 on the global list in 2022.
A bar built like a house party, with the technique kept just out of sight.
At 97 1st Ave, the space is split into two rooms built around different ideas of a night out. The Living Room is lounge seating around a central bar; the Kitchen Table is one long communal table that pushes strangers to share it. Neither reads like a conventional cocktail bar, and the menu follows the same logic.
Drinks at Schmuck lean savoury and food-driven rather than sweet. The BBL Brie and the Piña Colada Pickleback are the two most talked-about pours, built more like small dishes than classic cocktails, with a current running through them of not taking the format too seriously.
A house party built to scale
Judges for the Best New Opening award look for bars that reset expectations in their first year rather than simply execute a known format well. Schmuck's pitch has stayed the same since Barcelona: treat the bar like a house party with better technique behind it, and let the food-forward drinks do the work a more serious room would leave to the setting.
That approach now has a second city's worth of validation behind it. Where Two Schmucks proved the idea could travel from a small Barcelona room to international recognition, Schmuck in New York shows it scales into a tougher, more crowded market without losing what made the original work.
New York holds its ground
New York's four entries this year repeat the exact bars that made the cut in 2025, which suggests the city's bar scene isn't expanding its presence on the list so much as consolidating around a known set of names. Within that group, though, the order has changed: Schmuck's jump to No. 11 is the clearest sign of movement, and the first time a bar open less than two years has led the city's contingent.
The full World's 50 Best Bars 2026 list carries entries from 18 European bars this year, the complete ranking shows, with Paris overtaking London as the continent's best-represented city. Whether Schmuck climbs further in 2027 will depend on whether New York can add new rooms to the list rather than reshuffle the same four.
