Hong Kong Held Asia's Top Bar Spot for Five Years Running, Then Won the World's

Sheung Wan housed a dozen distilleries in the 1930s

More than a dozen distilleries once worked two streets in Sheung Wan — Wing Lok Street and Bonham Strand — blending and bottling Chinese spirits for a colony about to triple in population after the Second World War. The trade ran profitable enough that owners funded schools and temples. Foreign imports and urban redevelopment closed almost all of it by the 1960s; the Wing Lee Wai brand outlasted the rest, though it moved production out of Sheung Wan decades ago. Hong Kong kept the free-port instinct after the distilleries went: it abolished all wine duty in February 2008, becoming what its own government calls the first free wine port among major economies. For decades the city had inventory, not a bar anyone would fly in for.

Quinary opened in 2012, before Asia had a bar list to top

Antonio Lai opened Quinary on Hollywood Road in 2012. Its signature Earl Grey Caviar Martini used spherification, the technique developed at Spain's El Bulli, years before Asia's 50 Best Bars existed to hand out a trophy for it. Trade press at the time called it one of the first bars anywhere to bring that kitchen's toolkit behind a counter, not just onto a plate. Quinary is still pouring in 2026. It's the room that proved Hong Kong bartenders could compete on technique rather than import volume, and it set a template the city's serious bars have followed since: a house style built around one difficult, technical, signature drink.

Hong Kong topped Asia's list five years running, 2021–2025

COA, Jay Khan's agave-and-mezcal bar in Sheung Wan, was named the best bar in Asia in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Bar Leone, Lorenzo Antinori's Italian aperitivo bar in Soho, took the top spot in 2024 and held it again in 2025 — five consecutive years with a Hong Kong address at number one on the regional list. That October, Bar Leone won The World's Best Bar outright, the first time a Hong Kong bar has topped the global ranking, at a ceremony held in the city at Kai Tak Cruise Terminal. The run on Asia's list ended in July 2026, when Guangzhou's Hope & Sesame took the top spot — the first mainland Chinese bar to do so. Hong Kong still placed seven bars on the main list and collected eleven awards, more than any other city.

The house style now is restraint, not spectacle

Quinary's era ran on spectacle — liquid nitrogen, caviar spheres, a menu built to be photographed. Antinori built Bar Leone to do the opposite: no expensive equipment, a list of classic-leaning drinks he calls cocktail popolari, cocktails for the people, poured by staff in white jackets from a bottle kept in the freezer. Shelley Tai trained at Quinary before opening Mius in Sheung Wan in August 2025; she caps her own menu at fourteen drinks, six ingredients each, and calls the whole approach restraint. She won Asia's 50 Best Bartenders' Bartender Award for it in June 2026. Judges put the shift plainly this year: sophistication doesn't require spectacle. Hong Kong's best rooms are now making that argument with the drinks themselves, not the decor.