Cleveland, OHCocktails

The Velvet Tango Room has poured craft cocktails from its Columbus Road lounge for nearly three decades, an upscale room built around the drinks themselves. Longtime regular Ron Leonhardt Jr. bought the bar and, by Cleveland Magazine's account, changed as little as possible, preserving the character that made its name. It remains a destination for classic cocktails made with care.

Porco Lounge & Tiki Room turns its Ohio City space into a full tiki experience, with more than twenty Polynesian cocktails owner Stefan Was builds from deep dives into tiki culture and Caribbean rum. The Zombie is the drink to know, and Hawaiian shirts are encouraged. It is as much themed escape as cocktail bar, leaning hard into rum and ritual.

Society Lounge is a downtown craft cocktail bar on East Fourth Street that treats invention as the point. Its list runs from reworked daiquiris to reimagined manhattans, taking familiar templates somewhere less expected. The made-to-order, creativity-first approach makes it a fixture of the East Fourth cocktail scene, a place to settle in over a carefully built glass.

The Fairmount pairs cocktails with small plates at one of the area's busy Cleveland Heights intersections, working as an all-purpose neighborhood destination. The space includes a patio for warm months and a fireplace for cold ones, so it holds up across seasons. The cocktail-and-shareable-plates format makes it as suited to a full evening as to a single drink.

Cloak & Dagger stands out in Tremont as a fully vegan cocktail bar, an approach that has drawn attention well beyond Cleveland. Both the drinks and the bar bites are plant-based, and the menu itself takes a literary turn in how it is written and themed. It offers a distinct alternative for anyone looking for cocktails and small plates without animal products.