Hidden bars & speakeasies in Miami
Miami hides 6 bars worth the hunt, including Kaona Room, Red Phone Booth Miami and Bodega Taqueria y Tequila (South Beach). Unmarked doors, back-of-the-laundromat phone booths, no-sign basements — speakeasies that earned the word rather than borrowing it for the decor. They spread across Edgewater / Arts & Entertainment District, Miami, Brickell, Miami, South Beach, Miami Beach, South Beach (inside the Gale South Beach hotel) and 1 more area, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Kaona Room
A 'speaky-tiki' hybrid hidden behind a deliberately blank, unmarked entryway on a side street downtown — built secretly behind the scenes of the old Esotico tiki bar and revealed to guests in November 2022. Inside: Polynesian carved-wood details, jazz-club lighting, flaming-ice drink presentations, and a hard cap of 45 guests at a time.
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Red Phone Booth Miami
The entrance is, literally, a red London phone booth standing in the lobby of a Brickell office building — step inside, dial a code, and a wall swings open onto a 1920s-styled cigar lounge with leather chesterfields, rare bourbons, and a walk-in humidor.
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Bodega Taqueria y Tequila (South Beach)
By the sidewalk it's a scruffy taco shop; the actual bar is through a fake port-a-potty door at the back of the room, painted with graffiti and fitted with fake urinals as a joke gauntlet before it opens onto a full-scale hidden lounge.
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Swizzle Rum Bar & Drinkery
A rum-drenched Caribbean speakeasy tucked into a nondescript Collins Avenue storefront in South Beach, run under the radar since 2019 with an interior of jalousie windows, tropical print, and a menu built entirely around swizzle-style rum cocktails rather than the usual South Beach vodka-soda circuit.
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Medium Cool Cocktail Lounge
A windowless, sub-sea-level room in the actual basement of the Gale South Beach hotel — 1970s glam decor, live jazz, late-night DJ sets, and a velvet rope where getting past it is described by regulars as part of the experience rather than a formality.
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Caballero Rivero Woodlawn Park North Cemetery and Mausoleum
Behind a Calle Ocho storefront strip sits the 1926 stained-glass mausoleum, built by architect McDonald Lovell, where Gerardo Machado — Cuba's exiled dictator, nicknamed "the Butcher" for the killings and torture of his 1925-33 rule — was entombed after dying of colon cancer in Miami Beach in 1939. The same grounds hold Coral Gables founder George Merrick, former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás, and 13 British Commonwealth WWII war graves.
Hidden bars & speakeasies in Miami — FAQ
Which hidden bars & speakeasies in Miami are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Kaona Room, Red Phone Booth Miami and Bodega Taqueria y Tequila (South Beach). Kaona Room — A 'speaky-tiki' hybrid hidden behind a deliberately blank, unmarked entryway on a side street downtown — built secretly behind the scenes of the old Esotico tiki bar and revealed to guests in November 2022.
Where in Miami are they?
Across Edgewater / Arts & Entertainment District, Miami, Brickell, Miami, South Beach, Miami Beach, South Beach (inside the Gale South Beach hotel) and Little Havana, Miami. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Miami?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Kaona Room, for instance: Book a two-top for the '2-hour vacation to paradise' the room is built around — split a rum flight from the 50+ bottle list, order whatever cocktail arrives with fire on it, and let the low-lit, jungle-jazz room do the rest.
How were these hidden bars & speakeasies chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Miami guide.