Thanos Prunarus opened Baba au Rum in 2009 on Kleitiou, in what was then a cocktail desert. Athens had bars. It had music bars, bars for getting drunk, bars where the drinks were an afterthought to the playlist. What it didn't have was a place built around the craft of a drink — where the glass in your hand was the reason for everything else in the room. Baba au Rum was that place, and the city had no idea it needed it until it arrived.

“I'm proud to say that Baba au Rum was one of the very first European cocktail bars of the new era.”

The trajectory that brought him there is longer than it looks. He studied tourism management in Crete in the early 1990s, moved to London in 1998, worked as a waiter and then a bartender, and returned to Athens in 1999. What followed was a decade of bar work across the city — Inoteka, Zaza, Skoufaki, and finally Guru, a Thai restaurant and jazz bar that was the first venue in Athens to treat cocktails with any seriousness. Guru ran from 2005 to 2009. When it closed, Prunarus opened his own place.

Baba au Rum has been on the World's 50 Best Bars list eleven times since 2013, ranking as high as No. 2 in 2019. In 2025 it sat at No. 27 and received the Rémy Martin Legend of the List Award — an honour given to bars with the longest continuous presence in the ranking. That year it also won World's Best Spirit Selection at Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. The bar carries over 400 rums and has published eleven menus, each one a research project rather than a refresh.

Prunarus calls himself an Athenaologist and means it. He has spent years studying the city's urban transformation — the thirty years from the 1950s to the 1970s in which neoclassical buildings gave way to the international style, neighbourhoods became anonymous, and the soul of Athens changed in ways that are still being reckoned with. Every local who goes out in the evenings, he says, has been to Baba au Rum at least once. He considers that a responsibility, not a boast.