While every hotel stirs up a bar or two for guests, not every hotel offers a den as dark, moody and smouldering as Palace Hotel’s Royal Bar, where the whisky should be brooded over before drinking, and where the head bartender is, quite literally, the best in the world. A few years back, Manabu Ohtake bested 10,000 competitors for the ‘World’s Best Bartender’ crown in a Diageo contest. Ohtake’s bar is a place where they monitor the temperature of their ice … so you don’t have to.