Notes from the Magic Mountain
Barry's Piano Bar: Davos's Actual Late-Night Institution
How a 2006 breakaway from the famous McKinsey nightcap turned a hotel piano bar into Davos's real insider spot — and why there are now two of them.
Last updated: August 2026
How it started
- In 2006, a group of WEF delegates skipped the already-famous McKinsey nightcap at the Belvédère and went looking for somewhere quieter instead. They found Tonic, the piano bar upstairs at Hotel Europe. Richard Branson and a handful of other regulars started doing the same, arriving once the McKinsey crowd's own night wound down. By 2008, the piano bar the McKinsey group had originally been avoiding had become the actual insider spot of the week.
The piano man
- Barry, a piano player from Halifax, Canada, was the one playing. Hotel Europe traditionally splits the bar between two pianists on alternating weeks — Barry and a second pianist, Ian — and Barry's week was always, without fail, the week of the Annual Meeting. Enough couples have met around that piano over the years that regulars half-joke Davos is a decent place to find a spouse.
Why there are two piano bars now
- Around five Annual Meetings ago, a pay dispute left Barry without a venue for the week. Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince — who'd met his wife at one of Barry's earlier gigs — stepped in, and Cloudflare built Barry a permanent venue of his own: Barry's Piano Bar, across the street from the Coop and BlackRock, roughly 450 metres from Hotel Europe. Bloomberg and Reuters both covered the move at the time.
- Hotel Europe's bar carried on as before, now with Ian. Barry has his own room down the street. "Which piano bar" is now a two-part answer — both are worth it, depending on when you go.
Best sequence, if you only get one shot
- Barry's fills up early with Cloudflare's own corporate events, so it's genuinely hard to get in before midnight. Hotel Europe first, then Barry's once things wind down — not the other way round.
Getting in
- Some Davos venues need a hotel badge or a WEF badge to get in and some don't — we cover how that system actually works on our badges & access page rather than guessing venue by venue here.
Related reading: The Davos Nightcap Hierarchy
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