The Casco Viejo is where Panama City drinks, and it does it well. The neighbourhood's rooftop bars — looking out across the bay to the glass tower skyline on one side and the Pacific on the other — offer one of the better urban cocktail settings in Latin America. Cocktail culture is strong: local bartenders take their work seriously, rum and seco (a Panamanian sugar cane spirit) are the base spirits of choice, and the tropical fruit supply is excellent.
Outside the Casco, the Amador Causeway is the other main destination: more casual, more open-air, popular with local families and couples on weekend evenings. Cold Balboa or Atlas beer, sea breeze, and after dark the lights of ships waiting to transit the canal stretched out across the Pacific.
Panama City does not have a strong café culture in the European sense — air-conditioned coffee chains dominate — but the Casco has a growing number of independent places serving decent coffee from Panamanian highland beans (Boquete in the western highlands produces some of the best coffee in Central America, including the celebrated and expensive Geisha variety).