Quinary

At 56-58 Hollywood Road, past a door that announces nothing, a bartender sets down a martini glass topped with a wobbling grey foam and a spoonful of what looks like sturgeon roe. It is neither. The foam is whipped Earl Grey tea and lecithin; the roe is Earl Grey syrup pushed through algin into reverse-spherified beads that burst, rather than pop, against the tongue. Quinary has served this drink, the Earl Grey Caviar Martini, since it opened in 2012 — and has not once dropped it from the menu.

Fourteen years on, Quinary is still on Hollywood Road, still run by its founder, and still building its reputation on an idea borrowed from the kitchen rather than the bar: that a drink can be engineered for aroma, for temperature, and for the order in which a mouth meets a texture, not just for what's in the glass.

The Earl Grey Caviar Martini Opened the Bar in 2012 and Has Never Left the Menu

Quinary opened in Central in 2012 as the flagship of Tastings Group, the Hong Kong bar and restaurant company founder Antonio Lai had been building since 2008 through earlier ventures including Angel's Share, Origin and The Envoy. The Earl Grey Caviar Martini launched with the bar and has stayed on the list every year since — unusual longevity in a city where cocktail menus tend to turn over with the seasons. Published recipes differ at the margins: the South China Morning Post lists vodka, Cointreau, elderflower syrup, lemon and apple juice and cucumber; a 2021 Tatler profile lists vodka, dry curaçao, lemon, lime, cucumber, apple juice and elderberry. What every account agrees on is the technique underneath — a reverse-spherified Earl Grey "caviar" built with algin, and an Earl Grey foam whipped to order with lecithin. It was one of the first drinks anywhere to put El Bulli-style spherification on a bar menu rather than a tasting-menu plate.

Antonio Lai Brought the Technique Home From a Tony Conigliaro Bar in London

Before Quinary, Lai worked at 69 Colebrooke Row in London under Tony Conigliaro, one of the bartenders most responsible for moving molecular gastronomy's toolkit — spherification, foams, sous-vide infusion — off the pastry section and onto the bar. Lai brought that toolkit back to Hong Kong, and in 2015 was named Diageo World Class Hong Kong & Macau Champion, the city's most closely watched bartending title. He has since co-founded Draft Land HK, a draft-cocktail bar brought over from Taipei with Angus Zou in 2019, and now co-leads The Opposites alongside a fellow World Class champion — both under the same Tastings Group banner as Quinary.

Multisensory Mixology Treats Aroma and Temperature as Ingredients

Quinary's own description of its method is direct: flavour and aroma combinations, paired with different textures, appearances and even sounds, are built to challenge every preconception a drinker holds about cocktails. The bar runs its own lab, where Lai's team develops techniques — the venue names slow-cooking, carbonation, ageing and redistilling among them — the way a kitchen develops a dish, rather than treating a cocktail as spirit plus mixer plus garnish. The caviar box that lands with the signature martini follows that logic exactly: it isn't a garnish sitting on top of the drink, it's a second, separately engineered texture built to be eaten alongside it.

"The classic martini is relatively strong, and I wanted to make it more approachable."

That's Lai, in a 2025 interview, on why the drink that made his name isn't built to punch. Layering matters more than strength: "When you experience all these elements together, they create a richly layered mouthfeel that makes you fall in love," he said of the same drink — foam, caviar, citrus and spirit arriving in a deliberate sequence rather than all at once.

Quinary Ran on Asia's 50 Best Bars List for Eight Straight Years, Then Fell Off It

Quinary was named to Asia's 50 Best Bars every year from 2017 through 2024, an eight-year run that peaked at No. 26 in 2024 — the same year it picked up a place on Tatler's Best 100 Bars in Asia and the South China Morning Post's 100 Top Tables. In 2021 the list gave it a Heering Legend of the List award, a category reserved for bars judged to have shaped the region's drinking culture rather than just its current form. Quinary does not appear on the main list or the extended 51-100 list for either 2025 or 2026. That isn't a story about Quinary getting worse. It's a story about the scene it helped start getting more crowded: Bar Leone became the first Hong Kong bar named World's Best Bar in 2025, and Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026 put seven Hong Kong bars on its main list — Bar Leone at No. 3, plus Gokan, COA, Mius, ARGO, Montana and Penicillin — five of them arriving after Quinary's own run had already peaked.

The Menu Keeps Moving Even Though the Signature Drink Doesn't

In May 2025, Quinary marked what it called Earl Grey Caviar Martini Day with a limited run of 200 building-brick sets modelled on the drink — ten given away through a public contest, the rest sold at the bar for HK$150 each. In March 2026 it introduced The Five Senses: Flavour, an eight-drink menu built around Hong Kong memory and place, with cocktails including Cheeky Float, Wish & Wonder, The Heirloom, O Venice! and Maritime Bay, each priced at HK$150 and built from ingredients including tea gin, baijiu, shrimp oil and nori-infused vermouth. Lai framed the bar's current direction, in a January 2026 interview, around "simplicity and character" over elaborate design — a pull toward the neighbourhood register he says Hong Kong drinking is moving toward generally, even while Quinary keeps its lab running underneath it.

The Door Opens at 5pm and Runs on Walk-Ins Only

Quinary sits on the ground floor at 56-58 Hollywood Road, Central, open Monday to Saturday from 5pm to 1am and Sunday from 5pm to midnight, with last orders 30 minutes before close. There's no reservation line — the bar runs on walk-ins, the same way it has since 2012.