Handshake Speakeasy
Eric van Beek's team clarifies the piña colada and has kept the Fig Martini on since the bar opened. Two rooms sit at C. Amberes 65, one slow upstairs and one loud in the basement.
Why go
The bar moved into a Colonia Juárez hotel in 2021, and Eric van Beek joined as drinks director.4 In 2024 The World's 50 Best Bars put it first, ahead of every bar on the list and the first Mexican room ever to take that spot, and in the 2025 ranking it sits at No. 2 and takes the Best Bar in North America title.7 You get two rooms for one visit. The ground floor opens with a curtain and a welcome from the whole team, dark and low-lit with a 90s soundtrack; the basement runs faster, on hip-hop.4 Every member of the team is a bartender, and they change jobs weekly, working prep one week and the maître stand or the till the next.4 Eric van Beek runs it with Marcos Di Battista, Alejandra Orozco and Rodrigo Urraca, and there is a lab on the premises where the team works up new drinks and makes its own bitters.1
Liv Kelly wrote the 2024 result up for Time Out and put the short menu this way: The menu of drinks here might appear pretty stripped-back at first, but head bartender Eric Van Beek uses advanced culinary techniques in all the prep, so there's more to these cocktails than meets the eye.
2
Order this / avoid
- Order: the Fig Martini downstairs. It has been on the menu since the bar opened.4
- Order: the Three Sips Martini, which arrives looking like a floral bouquet.4
- Avoid: doing both floors in twenty minutes. They are two different bars and the basement is the late one.4
What locals & experts say
- The World's 50 Best Bars, on the house piña colada: it is
clarified and therefore refreshing rather than sweet and heavy
.4 - Gerrish Lopez, Time Out (10 October 2025), on what happens when you come through the curtain:
Step through its heavy curtains, and the entire team greets you in unison, setting the tone for what's to come.
On the drinks:classics are deconstructed, clarified and reimagined with finesse.
3 - Mexico News Daily on how the ranking is actually made: seven hundred experts vote anonymously on their own best bar experiences of the previous eighteen months.1
Good to know
- Book it, and read the small print. The bar takes reservations through its own site, for parties of one to ten; Mexico News Daily reports the OpenTable slot runs an hour and a half, caps a booking at six people, and asks a 250-peso deposit per extra guest once a party passes four. Anything over six goes by email.61
- The basement holds thirty-two, which is why it fills.1
Verdict
must-visit — The World's 50 Best Bars made it the first Mexican bar ever to take No. 1, in 2024, and it was second in the world and first in North America in 2025. Book it a month out, take the OpenTable slot, and keep the party under six or the deposit rule starts. Order the Fig Martini downstairs and the clarified piña colada, and watch who is working: every employee is a bartender and they rotate the jobs weekly, prep one week and the till the next. Eric van Beek runs the drinks with three partners and a lab on the premises. I have not found a critic who has written up the drinks themselves.