The first bar table I owned was a wobbly metal thing from a discount store, the kind with a particle board top that swelled the first time a glass sweated on it for too long. What it taught me is that height alone doesn't make a bar table good, the thing has to stay put when you lean on it, and that one didn't, it rocked like a boat every time I set a drink down.
If you've got nothing to start with, go for a solid wood or a thick metal top on four sturdy legs, nothing with a single pedestal base unless that pedestal is genuinely heavy, because anything light enough to carry with one hand is light enough to tip over with an elbow. You want the kind where setting a glass down makes a solid little knock instead of a hollow clatter, and where you can push on one corner and nothing shifts. Stools matter here too, get ones with footrests at the right height, because nobody wants to sit somewhere their feet dangle like a kid at the dinner table.
In an ordinary room, a bar table does best doing double duty, against a kitchen wall as extra counter space, or near a window as a spot for coffee in the morning and drinks in the evening. It sits well with simple backless stools that tuck away, or a couple of stools with low backs if you've got the room, and it looks better with something on it, a bowl, a plant, a lamp, than bare, because bare it just reads as furniture waiting for a party that isn't happening tonight.
When you're in a shop or standing in your kitchen the day it arrives, check the leg attachments first, give the whole thing a firm shake, not a polite nudge, because the hardware that holds legs to a tabletop is where cheap ones fail fastest. Run your hand across the top for any rough seam where two pieces were glued, and check the stool height against the table height before you buy, not after, because a table at forty two inches needs a stool with the right seat height or you'll be sitting with your chin at the table instead of your elbows. Feel the weight of it too, a bar table that a child could shove across the floor is a bar table that's going to end up wobbling under its own weight within a year.
The one mistake that ruins this whole category is buying the table and the stools separately without measuring both, because a gorgeous table with stools that don't match its height is just an expensive thing to walk past every day.
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