Have you ever heard of a ‘blind tiger’?
I’m not talking about a short-sighted feline, but slang for a very specific type of speakeasy that operated during the Prohibition of the 1920s in the USA. Guests would pay an entrance fee to an establishment under the pretense of viewing an exotic animal. That fee, however, was in fact the cover charge for a drink in an illegal bar. And if you hadn’t already figured it out, there was no such animal in the first place.
The glamor of the speakeasy has been immortalized in the public consciousness as a thing of romantic nostalgia for decades. Flapper dresses, sleeve garters, secret passwords: the tropes are instantly recognizable. They’ve been fetishized in some of the most celebrated movies of the last century, like Bugsy Malone and Some Like It Hot.
While the very necessary running of speakeasies in their purest Prohibition form is a thing of the past, they had a sort of renaissance just after the turn of the 21st century. This includes the iconic Milk & Honey, Lounge Bohemia, and Experimental Cocktail Club, which came to London via Paris.
Nearly two decades later and after a recent trip to Rosewood Munich to preview 100B, the hotel’s forthcoming Martini speakeasy, I started to dig around. Turns out, quite a few bars are adopting the moniker, spanning London, the Bahamas, New York City, and more.
But can you really have a speakeasy bar in 2026?
First Orders
To understand the origins of the speakeasy, we must go back just over a century to 1917, and the passing of the 18th Amendment, which proposed a nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Members of the Temperance Movement and Anti-Saloon League led the no-booze charge, and – after a brief hiatus during WW1 – in 1920, Prohibition came into full legal force across all 48 states. The speakeasy was born.
How these bars operated was myriad, marvelously creative, and meticulous in their duplicity. “The logistics of running an illegal enterprise would be huge for anyone,” explains historian Garrett Peck, who authored the speakeasy section in The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails. “But there was so much tax-free money to be made that for many people they were willing to take the risk, whether that was to be a moonshiner, the bootlegger or rumrunner, or the speakeasy owner.”
Prohibition Bureau agents were known to work from the inside and infiltrate speakeasies, gaining enough evidence to eventually get them raided. People also thought laterally about how to better hide in plain sight, with most speakeasies in Washington, DC, Peck tells me, operating out of homes. Others were run above legitimate businesses to give them some cover, while in New Mexico, pool halls were where bootlegging went down.
Despite their intrinsic need for secrecy, some speakeasies gained notoriety. A former blacksmith, Chumley’s in NYC’s West Village was a popular spot for influential writers, poets, playwrights, journalists, and activists.
Florida’s Key West, a hub for Prohibition’s rum runners with its proximity to Cuba, is still home to Captain Tony’s Saloon, which underwent many guises during Prohibition, later The Blind Pig. Al Capone’s Green Mill Jazz Club was one of the notorious mob-run speakeasies in Chicago, complete with underground tunnels.
Vignettes from the latter days of their lives have been captured by photographers such as FORTUNE’s Margaret Bourke-White, whose work was published in a 1933 issue (the year Prohibition was lifted) simply titled ‘Speakeasies of New York’.
They show bow-tied barkeeps standing in front of barrels of White Horse whisky, shaking cocktails and chatting to their bar-side patrons; businessmen in a regular haunt that opened at 8.30am so patrons could have a glass of rye whiskey before a day at the office; cocktails being mixed tableside with diners surrounded by methuselahs, salmanazars and balthazars of champagne.
The Renaissance
Seventy years or so after the lift of Prohibition and the notion of the ‘modern speakeasy’ began to trickle into the vocabulary. Bars like Angel’s Share, opened in 1993 by Tadao Yoshida, which inspired Sasha Petraske’s Milk & Honey in 1999, began this exciting new movement, which was also the advent of contemporary cocktail culture.
When PDT (Please Don’t Tell) opened in 2007, it did so through a phone booth in Crif Dogs hot dog stand, owned by Brian Shebairo and Chris Antista. The inability to get a second liquor license meant PDT became an extension of the business. “They could have done this with an open door, but Brian and Chris wanted to have fun with the entrance,” explains renowned bartender and author Jim Meehan, who built the foundations for what is now still one of the most famous in NYC.
Without any signage and before the days of rampant social media, it built its reputation on the power of the guest experience. “The most powerful form of marketing is personal recommendation,” says Meehan resolutely. “In my years running the bar, we took reservations by phone every day and kept a host reservationist on duty from 3pm till close. It was hands-on and very personal.”
Unlike the so-called ‘speakcheesies’ Peck refers to, which had all the cliched hallmarks of suspenders, fedoras and spats, PDT under Meehan took inspiration from other bars of its ilk to create something seriously special. “I hated the speakeasy moniker when we opened, as Prohibition-era speakeasies were unlicensed bars that infamously served spirits of dubious quality in a raucous social environment,” says Meehan.
“My goal at PDT was to bring the service and hospitality I honed at Gramercy Tavern to a bar with drinks of the quality I’d learned at The Pegu Club. I implemented Milk & Honey rules-inspired ‘etiquette’ that I upheld on St. Marks Place in the East Village. There was nothing speakeasy-inspired about any of this.”
Peck notes the strange fascination with romanticizing these illegal saloons of yore. “It was fun, and the drinks were delicious and hand-crafted. But let’s not forget that the Prohibition-era bootleggers and moonshiners were committing felonies. We don’t romanticize drug dealers, yet we have a rosy-eyed view of the 1920s and those who broke the law.”
Modern Muses
While these modern-style speakeasies never really went away, the popularity of those that came with sequined and mustachioed gimmickry waned. I always felt a bit sad when I saw feather boa and fedora-toting groups sidle up to a warehouse by my apartment that had been turned into a themed party mid-afternoon in the 2010s. Had we really forgotten how to socialize without cos-playing surreptitiousness?
But bars, it seems, in the 2020s are now coming full circle, 100 years after the original speakeasies, to bring drinkers pseudo-clandestine cocktail experiences. Spy Bar in London’s Raffles at The OWO takes its cues from the building’s former MI5 and MI6 days by creating a secretive James Bond-themed experience where even phones aren’t allowed. Horse to Water at the Bahamian resort of Baha Mar comes with a backgammon salon and rare spirits library; while Jeff Bell of PDT has opened two this year – Kees and Highball Ltd.
Another is 100B in Rosewood Munich, set to open late 2026, which revolves around the Martini cocktail and draws inspiration from the building’s former life as the Bavarian State Bank. “The speakeasy format felt like a natural fit for the building and for what we wanted 100B to be,” explains bar manager Mario Sel. “There’s already this sense of history, secrecy and discovery. We wanted to draw on that character without making the experience feel overly themed.”
Back in London, Simone Crepaldi of Callooh Callay has opened The Devil You Know bar under the modern Italian, aptly named Hoax restaurant. Channeling secrecy while trying to launch a business wasn’t easy. “One of the hardest parts at the beginning was not advertising on Google, and not being listed,” he tells me. “We relied on people coming for dinner then encouraging them down to the bar.” Taking up some space, instead, on third-party websites saw the needle move, and while he has since made the bar more searchable, the plan is to wind that down long term once word of mouth gets around. The drinks menu is a play on the ‘seven sins’ to give a sense of iniquity.
“Bars that want to channel the spirit of speakeasies should go analog. Besides a secretive entrance, ditch the website, social media handles, and digital reservations.”
Jim Meehan
As with the second wave of speakeasy-style bars, this new era is fundamentally not akin to those of 100 years prior. Asking Peck if he thinks speakeasies can authentically exist in 2026 and his answer is resolute. “No, I don’t. For one, bars are legal and must be licensed. The nature of the speakeasy was that it was illegal… Today’s speakeasies are entertaining replicas of the ones from the 1920s and early 1930s. And the drinks today are probably a lot better than the overpriced rotgut white lightning they often served.”
With the power of social media combined with the many challenges facing hospitality businesses, keeping a venue secret in this era is both borderline impossible and an unnecessary extra hurdle for operators. Sel, at 100B, is pragmatic when it comes to the social media dichotomy. “A speakeasy in 2026 obviously can’t, and shouldn’t, try to recreate the original experience literally… People will know 100B exists, and that’s fine. The interesting part isn’t keeping the bar itself secret but keeping some of the experience a surprise.
“For me, what makes 100B feel like a speakeasy is that sense of discretion and discovery. It’s limited in capacity, deliberately understated, and once you’re inside, it feels slightly removed from the world outside. A hidden entrance can create that initial sense of discovery, but that alone isn’t enough. The drinks, the service and the atmosphere all have to deliver once the guest is inside.”
Meehan is more in favor of the clandestine approach: “Bars that want to channel the spirit of speakeasies should go analog. Besides a secretive entrance, ditch the website, social media handles, and digital reservations. Ask people to turn off their phones in the bar and be a space where people really connect.”
It’s this element of the speakeasy-style bar renaissance that might go some way to explaining why it is happening again. In a post-Covid world where the ties of physical human connection were abruptly lacerated, socializing now – in an unstable, often confronting, ever-polarizing political world – is more important than ever for our collective souls.
It’s something Crepaldi touches on when I ask why he wanted to open something like The Devil You Know right now: “The guest has needed a change over the last few years. A lot of people are now looking for experiences rather than just a drink. It’s your time to switch off from your day-to-day, let yourself open up with the bartender and just have a release.”
Looking back at Bourke-White’s black-and-whites, and that’s just what the characters are doing. Post-war, post-millennium, post-Covid: seismic shifts in our timelines have seen the need for people to find a communal setting that feels slightly outside of time and space.
Is the speakeasy back? Not as we know it, but as we most certainly need it.
