Bengaluru has never really needed an excuse to go out for a drink. But lately, the city’s bars seem to be giving us plenty of new ones anyway. There’s a little bit of everything: bars that want you to slow down over a whisky, rooms that change personality after sunset, cocktails that come with their own stories, and places where the bar is very much the main event. 

Project Grain is one for the slow-sippers. Set in Rajajinagar, its programme is built around aged spirits, with Japanese highballs taking centre stage alongside cocktails that play with barrel ageing, botanicals and Asian influences. The best part? The room doesn’t try too hard. There’s live jazz, low lighting, good whisky!

Then there are the bars that are a little harder to put in a box. Heyou, on MG Road in Ashok Nagar, is built for the kind of evening that starts with just one drink and rarely ends there. It’s social, energetic and designed to move between drinks, food and music without making you choose what kind of night you’re having. 

In Kalyan Nagar, NoBa takes a more cocktail-forward approach, with a 120-seater space and a beverage programme led by veteran bartender Bala. The drinks are built in-house, from syrups and infusions to ferments, and the whole idea is that the food and cocktails should talk to each other rather than exist as two separate menus.

And then Bengaluru gets a little theatrical. The Dual Room in Indiranagar has figured out that sometimes the best way to make a night out interesting is to simply change the room around you. Come morning, it’s a bright, design-led café with coffee and matcha; come evening, the lights go down and the cocktails take over. Its night-time programme is built around the seven deadly sins, with 14 cocktails giving each sin two interpretations because apparently choosing a drink based on your moral shortcomings is now a perfectly reasonable way to order.

And if you want to take the whole after dark thing literally, The Cloak Society, hidden inside The Ritz-Carlton in Ashok Nagar, is the one to book. It’s a 25-seat, reservation-only speakeasy where you’re led into a dimly lit world of cloaked figures, theatrical storytelling and cocktails presented as “poisons”.