Socio

Socio turns its neighbours' scraps into the drinks list

At 17 Staunton Street in SoHo, a banana peel from the cake shop three doors down goes into a whiskey highball with lemongrass, white pepper and fig leaf soda. Oyster shells from a nearby raw bar get infused into vodka, then finished with a dash of vinegar. Nothing on the list is dressed up as garnish — it's the ingredient. Socio is a ground-level cocktail bar built on one working idea: SoHo throws away more food than any single kitchen can use, and a bar sitting between a dozen restaurants doesn't need to buy what the block already has spare. There's no roof deck, no lift ride to a view — you walk in off the street, same as everywhere else on the block.

The sourcing runs to restaurants within a five-minute walk

The list of donors reads like a short SoHo crawl. Butter Cake Shop hands over banana peels. Hooked and Uncle Miguel pass on kitchen offcuts. Chôm Chôm supplies chilli oil that would otherwise go in the bin. By its own count, Socio upcycles roughly 3.8kg of banana peel, 1.6kg of oyster shell and 800g of yogurt a month, worked into somewhere near 100 cocktails across the list. The bar describes the approach as community-driven sustainability, and says it tracks the waste it upcycles and puts the goals on the menu itself rather than in a mission statement nobody at the bar reads twice.

It's one entry in a wider shift, not a stunt on its own. The South China Morning Post's survey of zero-waste bars in the city, published in April 2025, placed Socio alongside a small cluster of Hong Kong operators — among them Sheung Wan's Mostly Harmless, winner of Time Out Hong Kong's inaugural Bar of Tomorrow award in December 2023 — testing whether sustainability can run the bar rather than sit on a line in the annual report. Hong Kong, the piece argued, is ahead of most cities on this; the open question is whether the model scales past a handful of committed rooms.

The menu runs eight cocktails, one country each

Each drink is built around a single Asia-Pacific country and whatever the neighbourhood has going spare that week. Gado pairs Balinese spiced rum with a gado-gado distillate, date and tamarind syrup for Indonesia. Rice runs wasabi gin against yuzu-infused cacao for Japan. Cumin is a yogurt-washed gin built around Indian spice; Alba takes Sri Lankan arak and folds in banana peel upcycled straight from Butter Cake Shop's kitchen next door. Dak Lak leans on Vietnam, built with Chôm Chôm's spare chilli oil. The house Old Fashioned stays local — Hong Kong-distilled N.I.P gin, jasmine tea distillate, salted plum, black sesame and local honey. Drinks run HK$120 to HK$130. The list started at four cocktails at opening and grew to eight on customer feedback, with new specials rotated in monthly and the full menu refreshed every few months.

That range — Indonesia to Japan to Sri Lanka to Vietnam to Hong Kong on one card — is the part a straight zero-waste bar doesn't usually attempt. Most sustainability-led lists lean on local produce and stop there. Socio pairs the upcycling with a stated ambition to give a spirit from each Asia-Pacific country its own drink, botanicals sourced from the same country where it can manage it, so the sustainability story and the regional story run on the same ingredient rather than competing for space on the card.

Every bar built this way lives with the same catch: a menu that depends on what a neighbour has spare that week is a menu that changes on a schedule the bar doesn't control. Socio's answer is to rotate the drink names and specials rather than promise a fixed list — honest about the constraint, not hiding it.

"It's the idea of not being able to make a drink because there's not enough of something."

Socio opened on Staunton Street in March 2024

The bar opened at ground level — no roof, no lift, a room entered off the street — at 17 Staunton Street in Central's SoHo district in March 2024, close to the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator and within walking distance of PMQ, Tai Kwun, Hollywood Road and Lan Kwai Fong. It's open every night of the week: 6pm to midnight Monday, 6pm to 1am Tuesday and Wednesday, 6pm to 2am Thursday through Saturday, and 6pm to 1am on Sunday.

The same founding team opened Gossip in Central in 2025

Socio's co-founders opened a second room, Gossip, in Central in the summer of 2025 — a cocktail-bar-and-nightclub hybrid built to close the gap between rooms with good drinks and rooms with a proper sound system. Time Out Hong Kong covered the opening in June 2025, describing queues trailing out along Staunton Street outside Socio itself while Gossip was still in soft launch — a detail that answers, in passing, whether the original room was still drawing a crowd more than a year after it opened.

Cathay Pacific singled out the sourcing model in its 2026 coverage

Montana took Cathay Pacific's Hong Kong's Best New Bar title in its 2026 Members' Choice Awards coverage. Socio didn't win it — but the same coverage carved out space to call it one of the city's most creative new watering holes, walking through the oyster-shell vodka and the banana-peel highball ingredient by ingredient rather than filing it under a general nod to sustainability. Two years after opening, that's the kind of write-up a bar earns rather than buys, and it landed the same year Socio still showed up on a running list of the city's 32 best bars.