2 Of World's 40 Best Bars Are 300 Feet Apart In The West Village

WEST VILLAGE, NY — 299 feet.

That's the distance between two West Village bars that recently got ranked in the top 40 of the annual World's 50 Best Bars list.

The two Lower Manhattan bars are Employees Only at 510 Hudson Street and Katana Kitten at 531 Hudson Street. The watering holes share a block, a neighborhood, and some of the best cocktails you can find in the entire world.

Employees Only is the only bar to appear in all 12 editions of the World's 50 Best Bars list.

Google Maps puts the 299-foot walk between the two bars as a one-minute venture.

Here's what the authors of the rankings had to say about Employees Only and Katana Kitten:

• Employees Only — 38th Overall: "It's the kind of place, you go for a steak and a Manhattan for dinner, stay for one last drink at the seductive serpentine bar and end up chowing down on the bar's famous 3:30 a.m. sober-up chicken soup. The team of white-coated bartenders here may be formally attired, but they have the freedom to be informal."
• Katana Kitten — 16th Overall: "A Japanese-inspired American dive bar named after a Samurai sword and a cat? Yes, that's Katana Kitten — it probably shouldn't work, but it most certainly does, not at least because this no thrown-together concept."

Employees Only and Katana Kitten weren't the only Greenwich Village area bars to make the coveted list. Dante, at 79-81 MacDougal Street, was named the second-best bar in the world on the 2020 list.

The walk from Katana Kitten through Employees Only to Dante?

A total of 12 minutes, according to Google Maps.

You can find out more about the World's 50 Best Bars list here.