There are familiar spaces, too, some of which have been reinvented.

This is our eighteenth edition of the list, and in all my years of bar crawls, I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much spirited originality-as many bars that make you say, “So strange, yet so awesome.” The pages that follow reflect that, with a slew of new bars to know. Over the past year, we criss-crossed the country to report on America’s finest drinking establishments.

I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen a line to get into a bar at noon. From the drinks to the bathroom to the music, Mothership commits hard to the idea that you’re in a spaceship that made an emergency landing on a tropical planet. That same spirit of custom creativity is what drinkers sought out in an even bigger way at Mothership in San Diego. “We felt that people deserved novelty.” He knows his customers: Every seat at the bar was full by 6:30. What, I asked Vucekovich, had sparked the idea to try something so delightfully trippy? And why were we seeing such a right turn away from cocktail classicism here and in so many other bars we’ve been visiting lately? “People were ready for something more fun after the pandemic,” he explained simply. This joyfully odd drink menu was the brainchild of Abe Vucekovich, Meadowlark’s beverage director, who used to work in one of the country’s most serious temples to the cocktail, just a few L stops away, the Violet Hour. You looked at the glass in front of you, sipped, looked at the bird picture again-and all of a sudden, it clicked. Each drink was meant to resemble a specific feathered friend. I was perusing the avian-themed cocktail menu at Meadowlark, an old library-like spot in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.

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