This is the one that gets recommended by people who actually live in Havana when you ask them where they’d take a friend from abroad. El del Frente sits across the street from O’Reilly 304 — its sister restaurant — and the rooftop on the fourth floor is one of Old Havana’s most genuinely enjoyable places to be between 4pm and midnight.

The mojito is the best consistently produced version in Old Havana right now. The bartenders use fresh yerba buena that actually smells like something, Havana Club 3 Años measured properly, fresh lime pressed to order, and a sugar level that enhances rather than drowns everything else. The soda is added last and cold. The whole thing is technically correct and the result tastes like what a mojito is supposed to taste like — citrus and mint forward, rum present without dominating, refreshing throughout.

The rooftop itself adds context. Views of Old Havana’s rooftops in every direction, vintage furniture, a genuinely mixed crowd of travellers and Cubans, no aggressive tourist-facing performance happening. You stay longer than you planned to because leaving involves giving up the view and the drink simultaneously.

La Dichosa sits on the corner of Obispo and Compostela and has been serving mojitos to the neighbourhood for longer than most of its current customers have been alive. It’s the kind of bar that doesn’t need to market itself — the quality has built its reputation word by mouth over decades and the local crowd at the bar counter on any given afternoon is the clearest endorsement available.

The mojito here is slightly different in style from El del Frente — less finessed presentation, but the core drink is excellent. The yerba buena is fresh daily (the bar is close enough to the city’s supply chain to get it consistently), the rum is Havana Club, and the bartenders have a routine that produces a reliably good drink without much ceremony. No flourishes, no performance, just the drink itself.

The atmosphere is unpretentious and genuinely Habanero. Tourists find it via word of mouth rather than guidebook, which keeps the crowd composition healthy. Prices are lower than the tourist-facing bars on Obispo proper.

The Hotel Nacional is one of the world’s great hotel bars — not for the mojito alone (though it’s good) but for what surrounds the drink. The terrace looks directly over the Malecón to the Florida Straits, the interiors contain walls covered in photographs of everyone from Winston Churchill to Marlon Brando who slept here, and the service achieves a level of professionalism that the rest of Havana’s bar scene doesn’t consistently hit.

The mojito is made correctly. The hotel uses Havana Club, fresh lime, and proper yerba buena. It doesn’t have the character of La Dichosa or the energy of El del Frente, but it’s a technically well-executed cocktail served in a setting that few bars in the Caribbean can match. At $7–10, it’s the most expensive mojito on this list, but you’re also getting a prime seat at a living piece of twentieth-century history.

Bar Monserrate sits at one of Old Havana’s most animated corners and has a reputation among travellers who’ve spent enough time in the city to find it. The mojito is good — not the technically pristine version of El del Frente, but solid, cheap, and served in the most live-music-dense bar environment on the entire trail. A rotating cast of son musicians plays most afternoons and evenings, and the volume is right for the space: present without being the only thing happening.

At $2–4 per mojito, this is the most affordable decent version on the list. The crowd is overwhelmingly Cuban with a smaller proportion of travellers who’ve been pointed here by someone who knows the city. Tables spill onto the pavement at peak hours. The energy from about 9pm onward is exceptional.

The original Sloppy Joe’s was one of Havana’s most celebrated bars through the pre-revolution period — a long mahogany bar, high ceilings, and a reputation that drew celebrities and writers in the 1940s and 50s. It closed after 1959 and sat empty for decades before being meticulously restored and reopened. The restoration is genuinely good: they used the original bar counter, original fixtures where possible, and the result looks like what the 1940s bar actually looked like rather than a theme park version of it.

The mojito is well-made. Professional bartenders, correct rum, fresh herbs. The crowd is tourist-heavy but the bar is large enough to absorb it without the cramped sensation of La Bodeguita. Order at the bar rather than at a table to get the best view of the room and faster service.

La Factoría is Cuba’s first craft brewery and operates under the arches of Plaza Vieja in one of Old Havana’s most beautiful squares. It’s primarily a beer bar — the house lager is excellent, cold, and cheap — but the mojitos are also available and decent. The reason it’s on a mojito trail list: the setting is incomparable, the mixed crowd of locals and travellers creates an energy rare in Old Havana’s tourist-facing establishments, and if you’re doing an evening circuit this is the correct pause point before moving on to the night-specific bars.

The mojito here is the weakest on the upper half of this list — competent but not the focus. Order the house beer first, the mojito as your second round.

El Cocinero is the rooftop bar sitting above Fábrica de Arte Cubano — Havana’s most ambitious arts venue, housed in a converted cooking oil factory in Vedado. The FAC model is genuinely unlike anything else: gallery space, live music, cinema, theatre, and bars all operating simultaneously in the same industrial complex, with a cover charge that gets you access to all of it. El Cocinero’s rooftop terrace above the FAC is where you end up on a good Havana night — open air, city views, a crowd of Havana’s creative class plus travellers who know about it.

The mojito is well above average. The bar programme here has more ambition than tourist-facing Old Havana, and the bartenders produce drinks with visible attention to what they’re doing. It’s a late-night bar — opening at 8pm on Thursday through Sunday — and the best time to arrive is between 9 and 10pm when the atmosphere is at its most alive.

Los Nardos sits directly opposite the Capitolio and is better known as a restaurant than a bar, but the drinks are reasonably priced and the mojito is decent — better than the tourist-trap options closer to Obispo, and at a price point that won’t make you wince. The main room is atmospheric: high ceilings, old photographs, the slightly faded grandeur of a place that’s been here through multiple eras of Havana. More of an incidental mojito stop than a destination for the drink, but worthy on the route between Old Havana and Centro Habana.

La Bodeguita sits at rank nine because the mojito doesn’t match the price or the mythology. It’s fine — it’s not bad — but at $5–8 for a drink that the bar in second place charges $3–4 for and does better, the value proposition fails on the merit of the cocktail alone. What La Bodeguita does have: the best graffiti-covered interior in Havana, a live trio that’s genuinely good, and the authenticity of actually being in the bar where the mojito’s fame was partly built. Visit once, preferably on a Tuesday afternoon rather than a Saturday evening.

El Floridita is last on the mojito trail because it shouldn’t be on the mojito trail at all — it’s a daiquiri bar and an excellent one. The mojito here is competent but not what the bar cares about. Rank ten is almost unfair in that sense; it’s not that the mojito is bad, it’s that the bar’s identity is elsewhere. Visit El Floridita for the Papa Doble or a classic daiquiri; it’s one of the genuinely great cocktail bars in the world for that specific drink. Just order the right thing when you’re there.