GOKAN

GOKAN occupies the site of Hong Kong's first ice storage, on Ice House Street

The ground-floor room at 30 Ice House Street, Central, sits on a site with mid-19th-century heritage in the city's ice trade — the street takes its name from the same history. Shingo Gokan, the Japanese bartender behind SG Group's rooms in New York, Shanghai and Tokyo, opened his first Hong Kong bar here with Russell Stradmoor and Amanda Cheung. The name is 五感 — Japanese for the five senses — and it isn't a slogan painted on a wall. It runs the room: five flavours on the cocktail list, five cooking techniques on the food menu, five colours in the design brief designer Atsuhiko Sugiyama worked to, blending classic Japanese lines with American vintage touches and a nod to Hong Kong's old bing sutt cafés.

Every cocktail sits in one of five flavour categories, and comes in three formats

The menu is organised by taste — sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, savoury — with each drink built to be ordered on the rocks, strained, or as a highball. The bar's calling card is the Watermelon Koffeezz, a gin fizz built on clarified watermelon juice and light-roast coffee from Koffee Mameya, the Tokyo roaster with a following of its own. It's the kind of pairing — fruit and coffee, clarified rather than blended — that reads as a bartender's training more than a bar's marketing. We'd start there.

Michelin chefs Zaiyu Hasegawa and Tsukasa Uraguchi built the food menu

Den's Zaiyu Hasegawa and Arbor's Tsukasa Uraguchi, both Michelin-starred, worked on an izakaya-inspired menu built around five techniques — raw, steam, grill, fry, simmer — meant to sit alongside the cocktails rather than behind them. Bartenders Kaito Ohba and Morris Chang run the pass, one trained in classical Japanese technique, one in the modern contemporary style. Between them, GOKAN climbed to No. 22 on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026, up from No. 33 the year before — the kind of jump that puts a bar on a second visit rather than a first.