The cocktail bars we send people to in North Loop, Minneapolis. Part of our full cocktail bars guide and the North Loop neighborhood guide.
The bar at Gavin Kaysen’s flagship North Loop restaurant. Walk-in only, ten seats, and one of the best places in the metro to drink at fine-dining bar prices without committing to the dining room. The seasonal cocktail menu is the order.
The small bar tucked inside the historic Butcher & the Boar building on 3rd Street North. Cocktails, snacks, a daily happy hour from four to six. The room takes the easy-going Tuesday-night register that the steakhouse upstairs can not. Open 4 PM nightly.
There is no menu. You tell the bartender what you are in the mood for and they build it on the spot, which sounds like a gimmick until the drink lands and it is exactly right. Caribbean-leaning bites, a first-come first-served room, no parties over six. The back has its own elevated dive called Neon Tiger if you want to switch registers without leaving the building.
The plush low-lit bar in the basement of Borough that helped set the modern Minneapolis cocktail standard. The Parlour Burger is the famous double, but the drinks are the reason to take the stairs down. Walk-in, open late on weekends, the kind of room where you settle in for three rounds.
A tiny, stylish jazz-leaning music bar in the old Askov Finlayson building. Live sets most nights in a room small enough that there is no bad seat, with a cocktail program that takes itself as seriously as the bookings. Go on a weeknight when you can actually hear the band and talk to the bartender.
Daniel del Prado built a plant-drenched speakeasy in the literal old Marvel Bar space beneath Porzana, and the ghost of that room is in good hands. You go around back to an unmarked service entrance, no reservations, first come first served. Dim, green, and one of the better date-night drinks in town.