How to Drink Well in Las Vegas

Rather than diving right into the hard stuff, sip one of the 35 craft beers on tap at the new SLS hotel’s Umami Burger beer garden. Pair it with an Umami pork belly sausage, served only at these bar stools.

Park on Fremont is a everything that a gastropub and beer garden should be, with a very cool, hipster bar (featuring taxidermy—a must these days), as well as ample space to stretch out underneath cafe lights in the back. It’s like a little piece of Austin, Texas right in the heart of Vegas. Plus, it’s open for brunch on the weekends.

Vesper Bar at The Cosmopolitan is our favorite spot for a serious Old Fashioned—or Elderfashioned, the house’s riff, which gets a dose of St. Germain.

As part of the downtown revitalization renaissance, one of the new, interesting places to open in the area has been Commonwealth, a stylish Prohibition-era cocktail bar complete with its own speakeasy. The cocktail menu consists of two types of beverages--those that speak to the higher-end crowd and those that are a bit grittier--but all of them are interesting and worth ordering. Commonwealth’s interior design is a bit dark but echoes the time period it is modeled after, and the attached, secret speakeasy has its own menu (ask a bartender for tips on how to enter and they might be able to help hook you up). One of the best highlights of this bar, however, is the fact that it’s a locals’ favorite, and there is an upstairs balcony where people hang out late into the night. The people watching from this open-air balcony is fabulous as people come and go from the Fremont Street Experience, though it can get a bit crowded at times.