Handshake Speakeasy: The Quiet Discipline Behind a World’s Best Bar in Mexico City

There is a certain stillness inside Handshake Speakeasy that feels almost out of place in Mexico City. Not silence, but control. While much of the city’s bar scene thrives on energy and movement, Handshake operates with a different tempo, one built around precision, repetition, and a refusal to leave anything to chance.

That approach has not only defined its identity but carried it to global recognition, culminating in its ranking as The World’s Best Bar 2024 by The World’s 50 Best Bars. The recognition positioned Handshake Speakeasy at the centre of a global shift toward precision-driven, system-based cocktail programs.

Behind that discipline is Eric Van Beek, whose influence is evident not through personality, but through structure. The bar does not revolve around storytelling or theatrics. Instead, it is built like a system, where every process is mapped, tested, and executed with consistency. What guests experience is not spontaneity, but control translated into a seamless, understated form of hospitality.

The Martini as the Defining Standard

Rather than positioning itself around a rotating list of signature creations, Handshake Speakeasy anchors its identity in a single, highly controlled expression: the Handshake Martini.

Served at a precise temperature and pre-batched to eliminate variation, the drink is less about interpretation and more about accuracy in execution. The structure remains faithful to the Martini’s core, built on gin and vermouth, yet the delivery is exact to a degree rarely seen in traditional service. Texture, dilution, and aromatic lift are all calibrated in advance, ensuring that every glass arrives in identical condition regardless of timing or context.

In practical terms, the Handshake Martini stands as the bar’s signature cocktail, defining its precision-led identity. It is not presented as a conceptual reinvention, but as a demonstration of what happens when every variable is controlled with intent. The result is a drink that feels clean, direct, and uncompromisingly balanced.

Development Happens Before Service Begins

What reaches the guest at Handshake is only the final stage of a much longer process. The real work happens behind the scenes, where cocktails are developed, tested, and standardised before ever appearing on the menu.

This approach shifts creativity away from the bar top and into preparation. Techniques such as clarification, filtration, and batching are used to ensure that once a drink is served, it requires no adjustment. The team operates within a system where consistency is designed in advance, not corrected in the moment.

Even drinks that draw from familiar structures, including variations linked to the Negroni, follow this principle. They are refined to a fixed specification, allowing the bar to deliver identical results across every serve without relying on individual interpretation.

Precision as a Working Method

There is nothing accidental about the way drinks are built or delivered. Temperature is controlled, dilution is calculated, and storage conditions are carefully managed to maintain stability from preparation through service.

This attention to detail extends to workflow. Every step is designed to reduce variation, ensuring that the outcome remains consistent regardless of who is behind the bar. It is a model that prioritises repeatability over individual expression, where the system itself becomes the defining feature of the experience.

The effect is subtle but unmistakable. Cocktails arrive with a clarity that feels deliberate, as though every element has already been resolved before reaching the glass. For guests, this creates confidence in the drink rather than curiosity about how it was made.

Recognition That Reflects a Broader Industry Shift

By the time Handshake Speakeasy was named The World’s Best Bar 2024 by The World’s 50 Best Bars, its approach had already begun influencing conversations across the global bar industry.

There is growing recognition that as cocktail culture matures, consistency becomes as valuable as creativity. Handshake sits at the forefront of that evolution, demonstrating that a bar can achieve worldwide relevance through discipline, operational clarity, and technical precision, rather than constant reinvention.

Its success reflects a broader recalibration of priorities, where the ability to deliver the same exceptional drink, at the same standard, every single time, has become a benchmark of excellence rather than merely an operational goal.

A Room Designed to Support the System

The physical environment mirrors the philosophy behind the drinks. Lighting is restrained, the layout carefully considered, and the atmosphere intentionally free from distraction. Nothing competes with the cocktail or the guest’s experience.

Service follows the same principle. It is efficient without feeling mechanical, attentive without becoming theatrical. Guests are guided naturally, allowing the experience to unfold without interruption. Every element of the room exists to support the bar’s disciplined approach to hospitality.

Where Consistency Becomes Identity

What Handshake Speakeasy ultimately presents is not simply a menu of cocktails, but a philosophy of bartending built on control, clarity, and repeatability.

The Handshake Martini sits at the centre of that philosophy, not as a spectacle, but as its clearest expression. It demonstrates how far a familiar classic can be refined when nothing is left unresolved.

In an era where innovation often dominates conversation, Handshake offers a different perspective. It argues that doing the same thing perfectly, every time, remains one of the most demanding standards in modern bartending, and perhaps one of the most enduring.