8 Great Bars in Hong Kong, the Best Town on Earth for Drinking

Hong Kong at twilight

With its complex, East-meets-West history and culture, Hong Kong is a vibrant city with a world-class bar scene that attracts talent from across the globe. The action is focused on the city center, where you can traipse up and down the hilly streets and alleyways from one creative cocktail den to another. We have so many favorites there; this was a hard list to write, but we’ve pinned down our top eight watering holes in possibly the best town on Earth for drinking.

Bar Leone

11-15 Bridges Street, Central

Bar Leone's Olive Oil Sour

The number-one bar on the planet, according to The World’s 50 Best Bars list, Bar Leone is a wonderful place to spend a moody couple hours sitting alone, gazing at a Sophia Loren poster and contemplating the state of things over a dish of the world’s most famous olives (they’re smoked, and you can buy them by the jar to tote home in your checked bag), a mortadella sandwich (piled high on focaccia with whipped ricotta and pickled chiles, it’s an absolute must), and a top-notch espresso martini (very rich and creamy, very caffeinated). 

Although Lorenzo Antinori’s paean to Rome doesn’t open until 5 PM, and it’s situated in Central Hong Kong, it feels like an all-day Italian cafe. It’s like barstool traveling to the Continent. Locals adore it. For a visitor to Hong Kong, that might feel superfluous, were the drinks not exceptional. Balance is the overarching principle. Mastika both offsets and extends the fruitiness of tomato in the gin-based Il Cacciatore. Aperol and hot sauce disarm the tropical punch of pineapple and passionfruit in the tequila-laced Boogie Nights. And the Yuzu Americano is as bitter and fresh as Sophia Loren herself in some of her best flicks.

Montana

Shop A, G/F, 108 Hollywood Rd, Central

Upstairs at Montana

Bar Leone impresario Lorenzo Antinori’s latest Hong Kong triumph is an imitation of a packed Cuban nightclub, complete with bow-tied bartenders, silver tray service, and cries of “Ritmo” from the crowd announcing the entrance of every new guest. A collaboration with Simone Caporale from Sip in Barcelona, the bar riffs on rum-soaked Latin standards, like boozy daiquiris spiked with maraschino liqueur and an imaginative pina colada, the pineapple barbecued for depth and guava thrown in for bright interest. Sit on the balcony overlooking the swinging bar for a comfortable perch and a front row view of the action.

Kinsman

G/F, 65-65A Peel Street, Central

Kinsman

Dreamed up by former Tatler Hong Kong editor Gavin Yeung, this Pearl Street paean to Cantonese culture is on point for a Hong Kong bar crawl. A mural of the city at night is splashed across the back bar. Blood-red booths and a checked linoleum floor give mid-century Chinese restaurant vibes. Opening a thick menu illustrated in watercolors, you almost expect to be ordering wontons. But though it serves shrimp toast and other snacks, Kinsman is a love letter to the world of drinks that the Cantonese diaspora helped create.

The recent “A Tale of Chinatowns” theme uses Chinese spirits and ingredients of place to evoke the neighborhoods founded by Cantonese emigrés in Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, Kolkata, and Lima. Combining Ming River baijiu, umeshu, orgeat, and Sichuan peppercorns with lime, salt, and tequila, a Chino-Latino cocktail called Flower Years tastes like the love child of a mai tai and a margarita. For the Champ’s Cup, cacao-nib Calvados, baijiu, and shochu booze up a pineapple-and-horchata elixir that mimics the Philippines’ sticky rice pudding, champorado. You can also cut to the chase with an esoteric Hong Kong pour. Snake wine, anyone? No matter what you drink, the romance of the city suffuses the experience.

Gokan

G/F, 30 Ice House Street, Central

Gokan

The legendary Shingko Gokan—founder of inspired bars across the globe, including New York’s Sip & Guzzle—brings his considerable chops to Hong Kong with this eponymous lounge on Ice House Street. Low ceilings, moody lighting, textural tile work, and big banquettes make Gokan a stylish place to park for a long night of catching up with friends.

The menu sets out a few organizing principles. Firstly, there’s taste: Sweet, Sour, Spicy, Savory, Bitter—and, boy, do they hit the mark; the Figaroni, a Negroni riff with fig leaf, is bitter medicine, indeed. Then there’s dilution, each taste category offering a highball, a rocks drink, and an up drink. But that sort of grid of choices doesn’t hamper the fun; the list is filled with jokes and surprises. Pizza Wine, for instance, tastes like it sounds, with the slice-centric flavors of tomato, olives, and basil—in part in a big, showy garnish—infusing Don Julio rum and, of course, rosé wine. The Grilled Corn Colada brings on the Japanese ingredients—shochu, shoyu, corn from Hokkaido, sake lees—combining them with pineapple for a disarmingly delicious morph of tropical cocktail and corn chowder. You’ll sip the creations out of hand-blown vessels designed by Gokan and Tokyo’s 115-year-old Kimura Glass. And there’s plenty to snack on here, too. Order the mountain of shaved ice, let the floor staff take excellent care of you, and relax.

Penicillin

L/G Amber Lodge, 23 Hollywood Road, Central

Penicillin photo credit Penicillin

Hong Kong’s first “scrap-less” bar is on a mission to minimize its carbon and waste footprint. The team here recycles, upcycles, ferments, and brews their cocktail ingredients, sourcing many of them as leftovers from prep at neighboring restaurants. The small space sporting lab equipment, like a Rotovap centrifuge for onsite distillation, EcoSPIRITS distillates are displayed in their reusable packaging, furnishings are fashioned from typhoon refuse, and the menu is made from old bar receipts that have been turned into paper pulp. The chatty bartenders will tour you around their “Stinky Room,” showing off jars of pickling leftovers.

The drinks can sound strange. “Melatonin in Plants” combines spinach-dill, wild moss, and wild fig leaf kombucha distillates, and is cooled by a frozen broccoli stalk. But though it tastes sweet and vegetal, it really isn’t all that weird to drink. Featuring a Rotovap watermelon gin and a jalapeño-infused, sous vide Campari, “Our Final Warning” really just tastes like a fruitier Negroni. A bit more off the wall is “The Original.” Made from spiced cherry tomatoes, salted coconut water, and vodka infused with discarded seafood shells, it hints of cole slaw—not unwelcome for a modern martini lover.

COA

Shop A, LG/F, Wah Shin House, 6-10 Shin Hing Street, Central

COA

COA opened in 2017 as an ode to agave spirits and the exciting Mexico City bar scene that celebrates them. The pleasantly dim concrete space feels like a candlelit CDMX drinking den, with the team throwing in a “Gracias” every now and again. We slurped down the Pepper Smash, a juicy glass of spicy chile-spiked tequila with basil and shiso. The classic margarita is rimmed with three salts, two of which supply protein from the addition of Oaxacan powdered grasshoppers and worms. It’s fun to see the Batanga on the menu, the classic Jalisco highball made from coke, lime, and tequila and rimmed with salt, but COA’s is frozen for extra refreshment and a fresh take.

The Savory Project

4 Staunton Street, Central

The Savory Project's Pepper+Corn

The folks from COA produced The Savory Project, another walk-in-friendly hang, just a few blocks away. The tight menu emphasizes umami flavors. Most riveting are the liquid tributes to food like the “Thai Beef Salad.” In lesser hands, this rum-based combination of peanuts, chile, coconut, and kaffir lime might get cloying; at Savory Project it was clean and downright delicious. A highball called Gari Gari brought ginger to the glass, of course, along with whisky, passionfruit, and ponzu in a fizzy, invigorating nod to Japan.

Quinary

G/F, 56-58 Hollywood Road, Central

Quinary

You’ll see them bobbing past at regular intervals, shaped like foamy soft-serve ice cream cones. Quinary’s Earl Grey Caviar Martini holds little resemblance to a proper martini. It’s more like a vodka gimlet peppered with tea pearls, but its towering swirl of tight bubbles pleasantly tickles your nose. There are cutesy marshmallow milkshakes in mini soda bottles and a gin drink (called Glass, for its silky cool texture) with boozy bijou gummies (absinthe, campari, and suze) balancing on a big ice cube that are meant to be chewed as you drink to alter the flavor with every sip. From Antonio Lai, the self-described pioneer of Hong Kong’s “Multisensory Mixology” movement, the bar sports an onsite laboratory, visible at the end of the bar. It’s kitschy and perhaps takes itself a bit too seriously, but Quinary’s scene is lively, and the team makes an outstanding basil smash.