Where to drink this in Asia

Opened in June 2023 by Lorenzo Antinori, who was born in Rome and worked in London, Seoul and Hong Kong before opening his own room. The bar is built on cocktail popolari, the unpretentious neighborhood drinking of Trastevere, and the programme is deliberately low intervention: no redistillation, no complex equipment, seasonal ingredients and classic technique. Named The World's Best Bar 2025 and The Best Bar in Asia 2025.

15 Bridges Street, Central, Hong Kong

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 1 (the50.com)

Opened in 2017 by Jay Khan and named for the blade used to harvest agave. Forty seats, a new cocktail every week, and an agave list running past forty pages, sorted by species with notes on terroir, soil and microclimate. The room takes its cues from Oaxaca, and the food menu was built with the Mexican restaurant Chicano.

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

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 38 (the50.com)

Opened on Amoy Street in 2012 by Indra Kantono and Guoyi Gan, and moved to the lobby of the Amara Hotel in Tanjong Pagar in 2018. The drinks stay close to the classics. What the bar is known for is its annual menuzine, an editorial style menu that patrons collect. The current edition, Embrace, runs to 68 pages and is divided into sections that set out what each group of drinks is trying to do.

Amara Hotel, 165 Tanjong Pagar Road, Singapore 088539

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 9 (the50.com)

In its eleventh year and its third address, seating about fifty. Founder Colin Chia and head bartender Sim Sze Wei work from Singaporean reference points: the mama shop under the block, the herbalist's drawers of dried roots, the ice cream cart. The current menu honors twelve locals the bar works with, among them the tailor who makes its pink uniforms and the rattan craftsman behind its stools and lampshades, each with a drink built around their trade.

8 Purvis Street, Singapore

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 50 (the50.com)

Founded in September 2023 by Sudarat Rojanavanich and Veerach Sawaengsupt, both of whom came out of art direction, which shows in the room and in how the service is sequenced. The menu is laid out like a tasting menu: Starter, Mains, After, All Night. The Mains are the savory, food derived drinks, built on guava leaf, green chili and makrut lime. Ranked fourth on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2025.

1/37 Floor, 1 Soi Sukhumvit 26, Khlong Tan, Khlong Toei, Bangkok 10110

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 15 (the50.com)

Inside the Four Seasons on the Chao Phraya. Arches, a mirrored back bar, and smoking terraces large enough to work as bars in their own right. The floor is run by Philip Bischoff, Dheeradon Dissara and Chunyanuch Yodsuwan, and the bar took the Michter's Art of Hospitality Award at Asia's 50 Best Bars 2022. The current menu looks to Mexico and is split into People, Places and Parties, with riffs on michelada, tepache and horchata.

Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok at Chao Phraya River, 300/1 Charoen Krung Road, Yan Nawa, Sathon, Bangkok 10120

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 49 (the50.com)

Vegetables and herbs come through contract farming, and the honey comes from the bar's own hives in Seoul. Spirits are drawn from Korean micro distilleries and craft breweries alongside imports. Co-founder Dohyung Kim won the Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award in 2024. The waste policy is the programme: a single Hallabong is juiced for one drink, its peel infuses the house gin, and the pulp becomes cordial or is fermented. There is no back bar display and no garnish unless the drink needs one.

B1, 55 Dosan-daero 55-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 16 (the50.com)

Hiroyasu Kayama grows much of what he pours on a farm in Chichibu, an hour northwest of Tokyo. Drinks are stirred with twigs cut from mizunara or juniper. Absinthe drippers hang above the counter, some of the bottles behind it lost their labels decades ago, and one of the spirits is an absinthe distilled on the farm. Seventeen seats, and no two visits are the same.

9F, 1-13-7 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku City, Tokyo 160-0023

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 18 (the50.com)

High in the Four Seasons at Otemachi, with floor to ceiling windows over eastern Tokyo and the Skytree. Keith Motsi's team speaks nine languages between them. Most of the menu sets French spirits against Japanese produce, and a map inside it marks where each ingredient comes from, down to the sake brewery or the orchard. Won the Michter's Art of Hospitality Award in 2024.

Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Otemachi, 1-2-1 Otemachi, Chiyoda City, Tokyo 100-0004

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 45 (the50.com)

Opened in Shibuya in 2020 by Atsushi Suzuki, who worked in New York and Japan before it. The room borrows from the cafe culture of the late Meiji and Taisho years, when Western and Japanese habits first began to mix. The drinks follow the structure of kaiseki: sakizuke, yakimono and gohan each return as a cocktail, built on Japanese and Western spirits chosen to match the dish they stand in for. An unmarked sushi counter at the back serves a twelve piece omakase.

41-31 Udagawacho, Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0042

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 48 (the50.com)

Open since 2016 behind a Cantonese cha chaan teng in the Dongshankou district, entered through a refrigerator door. Founded by Bastien Ciocca and Andrew Ho, who took the Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award at Asia's 50 Best Bars 2025. The drinks pair regional ingredients with ultrasonic infusion and rotary distillation, and the menu turns over by season and by theme. On the Asia list since 2019, and new to the world list in 2025.

Miaoqian Xijie 58, Dongshankou, Guangzhou

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars 2025, rank 29 (the50.com)

The seasonal rooftop bar of the Mandarin Oriental Savoy, open April through September and named for the hotel's 1838 founding year. Asian-inspired plates, poke, bao, Thai ceviche, run alongside cocktails, mocktails and a large sake selection.

Poststrasse 12, 8001 Zürich

Source: Mandarin Oriental Savoy, Zurich, official site (mandarinoriental.com)

Opened in a former fishing-supply shop at the end of October 2018 by Dirk Hany, with a two-story spirits gallery of around 400 bottles behind the counter. For a collaboration with the sake importer shizuku, the bar built a menu called Sip It Classy around Japanese ingredients: sake, shochu, shiso liqueur and kabosu.

Stadthausquai 1, 8001 Zürich

Source: Sip It Classy, a shizuku sake collaboration cocktail menu by Bar am Wasser (shizuku.ch)

The bar at La Réserve Eden au Lac, a hotel on the Utoquai lakefront. The cocktail menu carries a dedicated shochu and sake list alongside its spritzers and highballs.

Utoquai 45, 8008 Zürich

Source: Eden Bar cocktail menu, La Réserve Eden au Lac Zurich (lareserve-zurich.com)

A rooftop restaurant and bar on the sixth floor of the former Modissa building on Bahnhofstrasse, reached by a lift on Uraniastrasse. Both the food and the cocktails take their cue from Asia: dumplings and Pad Thai on the kitchen side, sake worked into the drinks list.

Bahnhofstrasse 74, 8001 Zürich

Source: ••• Rooftop listing (zuerich.com)

A Langstrasse venue that pairs a street-level tap-cocktail bar, Tipsy Tiger, with a hidden upstairs speakeasy, Dry Club, entered through a secret door. Asian-inspired bar food, wasabi cacio e pepe, bao buns, runs alongside a cocktail menu split into classics and signatures.

Langstrasse 133, 8004 Zürich

Source: Dry Club bar menu, Tipsy Tiger (tipsytiger.ch)

Opened in 2022 in Hamburg's Altstadt, built around miso, matcha, yuzu, wasabi, sake and shochu, with a bar counter set at a deliberately low one meter to keep bartender and guest at eye level, in the manner of a Japanese bar. The room seats around 30.

Schauenburger Straße 35, 20095 Hamburg

Source: fizzz Awards, nominated for Bar of the Year (meininger.de)

A cocktail bar and kitchen in Eppendorf, teal walls, golden spotlights and abundant plants giving the room what the guide calls a boudoir charm. The bar lights down and the music comes up after 10pm. Notable drinks include the violet fizz, lavender and whipped egg whites, and the RTP highball, raspberry, thyme and pink pepper.

Hegestraße 14, 20251 Hamburg

Source: Crème Guides, 'Botanic District Bar in Eppendorf' (cremeguides.com)

A Thai bar and kitchen set in a backyard industrial unit near the Schanze, entered through a warehouse door and a curtain. The seven-meter bar stays open to walk-ins after the kitchen closes. Named New Bar of the Year at the Mixology Bar Awards 2023, then Restaurant Bar of the Year for three years running.

Waterloohain 7, 22769 Hamburg

Source: Mixology Bar Awards: New Bar of the Year 2023, Restaurant Bar of the Year 2024 through 2026 (mixology.eu, reported by thelocal.de)

Opened by Jörg Meyer in 2009 in Hamburg's Altstadt, styled after a Parisian bar of the 1920s: heavy carpeting, dim indirect light, patterned wallpaper, a metal lion set into the back wall. Meyer created the Gin Basil Smash here, gin, basil and lemon, now served as a modern classic in bars well beyond Hamburg.

Rathausstraße 3, 20095 Hamburg

Ranked 16th in The World's 50 Best Bars in 2013, and listed in multiple years since 2009. Not in the 2025 edition.

Source: The World's 50 Best Bars, ranked 16th in 2013; listed in multiple years since 2009 (reported by mannvonwelt.net and galumbi.com)

Set inside the Fairmont Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten on the Inner Alster, Nikkei Nine cooks Nikkei cuisine, the Japanese-Peruvian style carried by Japanese emigrants to South America, over a robata grill in a walk-in show kitchen. The two-seat bar pours Japanese-Peruvian cocktails alongside champagne and sake.

Neuer Jungfernstieg 9-14, 20354 Hamburg

Source: GM Bar Award 2024/2025; Fairmont Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten (nikkei-nine.de)

A cocktail bar in Hamburg's Sternschanze taking its name and ingredients from the countries around the Pacific rim. The published drinks menu lists the Ukiyo, built on yuzu gin, green tea and matcha.

Neuer Pferdemarkt 31, 20359 Hamburg

Source: Pacific Bar official drinks menu (pacific-bar.de)

A Korean restaurant and bar in the Karolinenviertel, entered through a gate built to look like a South Korean metro station. The room is styled around Seoul's 1988 Olympics era, with neon signs, vintage movie posters and retro arcade machines, and turns into a karaoke venue in the evening. The menu pairs Korean comfort food with soju and makgeolli.

Karolinenstraße 1, 20357 Hamburg

Source: Tabletales Hamburg venue guide, 'Seoul Station 1988' (tabletales.hamburg)