8 Best Nightlife in San Miguel de Allende and the Heartland, Mexico

Centrally located Berlin is a pretty, popular, upscale bar with an international crowd. With German as well as international entrées, salads, and appetizers, the food is great, too; eat at the bar, the small restaurant in the back, or in the lounge under the exhuberant oil paintings of Peter Leventhal. Dinner is served until 11:30 pm.

La Azotea, located on the roof of Pueblo Viejo restaurant, is a popular haunt for the well-heeled and well-dressed crowd, making for supreme people-watching as well as great sunset views. There's a bar menu, too, for nibbling a jicama taco, for example: breaded shrimp with chipotle mayo in a thinly sliced jicama wrap.

Eight different mezcals, all from Oaxaca state, are used to create mixed drinks as well as shots to be savored. Try a cucumber-and-cilantro margarita, or one with red grapes, chilies, or ginger and mint. Many of the ingredients used in the indoor–outdoor bar's satisfying snacks—from sausages to bread and ice cream—are made by the owners themselves, a Swede and his Mexico City–born wife. The small but interesting menu meanders from oysters baked with spinach and Parmesan cheese to arugula salad, beef fillet on a coffee crust, and the Oaxacan specialty fried grasshoppers. Also available are Mexican wines and Dos Aves, San Miguel's artisanal beer.

Located in what was the oldest cantina in town, the small, often lively and crowded "Fat Mermaid" offers exotic drinks such as fresh ginger martinis starting at 1 pm. Enjoy yummy seafood tacos at tiny booths or on the equally diminutive open-air back patio.

Limerick is a big, boisterous Irish bar, complete with a dartboard and pool table, and attracts a young crowd.

One of San Miguel's original restaurant-bars geared to travelers looking for music, drinks, and dancing, Mama Mia still delivers. Within various salons a block from the main plaza—including a video bar, restaurant, and several other spaces—the bar hosts jazz, flamenco, rock, Latin (salsa), and classical guitar musicians throughout the week. There's karaoke, too, and soccer, American football, and other sporting events on a big-screen TV.

Within a transformed older house about four blocks from the main plaza, this chummy bar serves exotic margaritas with cucumber or chilies. You can also get a variety of small tapas plates, many featuring fresh seafood, if you want a nibble with your cocktail. Although each of its three contiguous rooms is smallish, the high ceilings make it quite acceptable to claustrophobes.

Although primarily a restaurant, Tío Lucas, across the street from the Angela Peralta Theater, offers live music nightly—jazz, blues, and salsa—and welcomes drinkers as well as diners to its intimate, upscale, rock-lined dining room.