Charge It to My Room

By the time the lift opens onto the 18th floor, the air has already changed. There is the city at your feet, a golf course catching the last light, and a hum indicating a busy night. But the guest in the corner, still in business casuals, is not nursing whisky on the rocks, like you expect him to at a hotel bar. Instead, he’s sipping on a reposado neat, asking the tequila sommelier about ageing styles and regional distinctions.

This is Aasmana at The Ritz Carlton, Pune, and inside it is a quieter, more focused space called the Agave Bar. The team has a phrase for evenings like this. They call it the shift from “consumption to appreciation.” Watching it happen, it’s hard to remember you are in Pune, and it is even harder to remember you are in a hotel bar.

Not long ago, the quintessential hotel bar in India was fairly predictable. You walked in after a long day, or before dinner, or sometimes even in the middle of a meeting that had somehow turned social. There was a piano in the corner. The drinks list was familiar. You ordered the drink you always ordered, with soda or water, and the bartender nodded and made it the way they always had. The hotel bar, in the truest sense, was an amenity. That is not the case anymore.

“Hotels slipped behind when it came to bars,” says Pankaj Balachandran, India’s leading bar consultant who partnered with Amaraanth, a boutique hotel in Goa, to start The Lab, an experiential bar within the property. “Maybe not restaurants, but definitely bars [were overlooked]. The positive side is they now have the opportunity to take that space back entirely.”

The team at ZLB 23 at The Leela Palace Bengaluru sees the same shift in the way guests are arriving. Bar hopping, according Suchismita Roy Chowdhury, assistant food and beverage manager at The Leela Bengaluru, “is a very serious thing now”.

Guests choose where to spend an evening based on the bar, not the address. Why hotels are only catching up to that now is the question Balachandran keeps coming back to. He sees hotel bars and standalone bars as two sides of the same coin.

“One isn’t necessarily better than the other. They just operate differently.” The bigger question, he says, is whether hotels actually use the advantages they have. “A lot of hotels have all the ingredients required to build world-class bar programmes, but not all of them prioritise bars as cultural or creative spaces.”

If Amaraanth is treating the bar as a laboratory, ZLB 23 is treating it as a theatre. The Kyoto-style speakeasy, ranked 31st on Asia’s 50 Best Bars in 2025, recently unveiled a space inside ZLB 23 itself that can seat up to seven called The Theatre, three shows a night, no menu. Cocktails arrive in structured acts, introduced like characters in a play, building the palate from bitter to sour to savoury to sweet.

“We’re not just building a great bar,” the team says. “We are operating inside a larger luxury ecosystem, where consistency, service standards and guest expectations are non-negotiable every single night.”

It is the clearest example in India of a hotel bar refusing to behave like a hotel bar. At the Agave Bar, the seriousness shows up differently: a tequila sommelier on the floor, rare labels, regional distinctions, cocktails designed around the complexity of the spirit. Pune is not Mumbai or Bengaluru. It rewards consistency, authenticity, and exciting ideas minus the gimmickry.

The other thing Pune has, increasingly, is access. Big luxury hotels across the country are now opening their floors to international takeovers, which means in-house teams are getting direct exposure to global trends and bringing those techniques into their menu. JW Marriott Pune has been hosting talent from Asia and Europe’s best bars in the past year alone. Goa is where this shift is happening in two directions at once.

At Renaissance Goa, the recently opened R Lounge is building its identity around a working lab from day one, reinterpreting Goan ingredients through modern techniques. Hidden in plain sight, the lab is where the innovation actually happens, even as the drinks are served out front.

The Azulejo Tonic, the bar’s signature, takes its name and visual language from Portuguese-Goan tile work: jamun vodka, tonic, cucumber, onion seeds. The surprise ingredient of the lab, the team says, has been Goan sea salt, used not for salinity, but for the minerality it adds to a spirit-forward drink.

A few kilometres away, another hotel has gone further, building the entire property around cocktails. The Passport Hotel in Assagao, founded by Ashesh Sajnani, the man who introduced Mumbai to the speakeasy with Please Don’t Tell, positions itself as India’s first cocktail-forward traveller’s hotel.

The bar is not inside the hotel. The hotel is built around the bar. Every space, every transition, every guest journey starts with the drink. The guest Sajnani has in mind is specific. “A curious mind who travels simply for the joy of experiencing something new, something old, something exciting and even something boring.”

But not everyone is building a programme. Some are building a mood. At Narendra Bhawan in Bikaner, the boutique hotel set inside the former residence of erstwhile Maharaja Shri Narendra Singh (the last reigning king of Bikaner), the bar called The Closet takes nostalgia, intrigue, and a touch of mystery and turns them into a room.

The premise is a letter the maharaja once wrote to a friend, imagining a forgotten closet from the basement of the nearby Laxmi Niwas Palace, his family’s ancestral home, transformed into a space “as irreverent as it was indulgent.”

The signature is a barrel-aged Negronita, chosen because it is red and a delightful mix of bitter and sweet, “like Narendra Singhji’s letters.” Bartenders adjust every cocktail to the guest in front of them, reading palates the way someone might read a room.

In Mumbai, Black Lacquer, the Japanese-inspired listening bar tucked below the new Roswyn hotel (part of the Ennismore portfolio), is doing the same thing in a different register. The vinyl is the headline. Cocktails move with the music. “Guests are increasingly drawn to experiences with character, cultural relevance, and a stronger sense of identity,” says Prasad Metrani, who runs F&B at Roswyn and Fairmont Mumbai. Two cities, two centuries apart in tone, the same conviction.

The hotel bar can begin not with the drink but with the room. Balachandran sees the next phase clearly. “The future model may actually look like a standalone-quality bar operating inside a luxury hotel ecosystem,” he says, adding, “where the hotel provides the infrastructure and scale, while independent operators bring identity, culture, agility, and creative energy.”

The Cosmopolitan and the Bloody Mary are still on the menu somewhere, if you want them. But the luxury hotel bar in India is no longer the place you go because you happen to be staying upstairs. It is the place you go because you came for it.