Top Cocktail Bars gives three stars to Asturian Patio de Butacas
The Spanish and Portuguese bar guide puts a cocktail bar in Pola de Siero, a town of 13,000, alongside six bars in Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid and Zaragoza.
Top Cocktail Bars, the Spanish and Portuguese guide that the Spanish press calls the “Michelin of bars”, has given three stars to El Patio de Butacas, a cocktail bar in Pola de Siero, a town of about 13,000 people in Asturias.
The 2026 ratings were handed out on Monday 28 September at the Teatro Magno in Madrid, at a gala run by Neodrinks, the company behind the guide. This edition lists 137 bars across Spain and Portugal, up from 125 in 2025, and adds new categories such as best cocktail menu.
Infobae lists seven bars at the top level: 14 de la Rosa and Sips in Barcelona, Angelita and Devil's Cut in Madrid, El Niño Perdido in Valladolid, Moonlight in Zaragoza and El Patio de Butacas. The Asturian bar is the only one of the seven outside a large city. A year ago, when six bars held three stars according to InfoHoreca, it had just won its first star.
A town of 13,000 now pours at the same level as the best bars in Madrid and Barcelona.
A three-star Top Cocktail Bars menu from the roadside
Berto Díaz opened El Patio de Butacas in 2018 in the old town of Pola de Siero, a parish of the municipality of Siero less than 20 kilometres from both Oviedo and Gijón. Much of what goes into the glass is picked by Díaz on the paths around town, grown on family land in Santa Eulalia de Vigil, three kilometres away, or brought in by neighbours with surplus from their vegetable gardens, the food site Gastronomía y Moda reports. The bar works with fermentation, enzymatic hydrolysis, distillation and controlled maceration.
The current menu, Vínculos Invisibles, has 15 cocktails, six of them also made without alcohol. Each one pairs ingredients that share aromatic compounds: in Bruma, bay leaf leans towards tobacco; in Lumbre, fig leaf recalls coconut; in Ámbar, fir suggests peach. Verdeo mixes tequila with sorrel, chilli honey and black-pepper salt. The printed menu explains each pairing, its intensity and the compounds behind it. “We look for the apparently invisible thing that links flavours” is how the bar sums up the idea in Infobae's report.
Three stars outside the big cities
Until now the top tier has belonged to bars in Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon and regional capitals such as Valladolid and Zaragoza. Unlike the World's 50 Best Bars extended 51-100 list published in September, which is voted on by hundreds of bartenders and writers, Top Cocktail Bars is decided by a jury, with one separate award left to a public vote.
El Patio de Butacas also holds a Solete from Guía Repsol. For a bar whose larder lies within three kilometres of the counter, the next menu will depend on the season as much as on the Top Cocktail Bars stars.
