Tell Camellia

Tell Camellia re-enters Asia's 50 Best Bars at No. 81

Asia's 50 Best Bars published its extended 51–100 list on 14 July 2026, ahead of the main ceremony at Wynn Palace, Macau, on 28 July. Tell Camellia sits at No. 81, and the organisation's own listing marks it explicitly as a RE-ENTRY — its description reads: "This 2019-opened lounge in Central Hong Kong continues to pioneer the intersection of tea culture and modern mixology through its innovative 'Teatails.'" Two other Hong Kong bars made the same extended list — The Opposites at No. 54, up twenty-six places on the year before, and The Savory Project at No. 60. Three Hong Kong entries on one list is a solid showing against Singapore's seven, and it puts a tea-forward bar back into a conversation this city usually has about agave and amaro.

The bar sits below street level in H Code, on Pottinger Street

Tell Camellia opened in July 2019 on the lower ground floor of H Code at 45 Pottinger Street, Central — a building that has, over the years, held a rotating cast of the neighbourhood's more serious drinking rooms. Coconuts described it at opening as "designed as a speakeasy," tucked into a building most passers-by wouldn't clock from the street. You reach it by going down, not up; the room is windowless and low-lit, built for a conversation that doesn't need to carry outside. Trade coverage called it Hong Kong's first contemporary tea-cocktail bar when it opened, and six years on, nobody in the city has taken the title back.

The tea comes from Nepal, hand-picked and fermented in house

The bar's co-founder, Gagan Gurung, was born in Nepal and raised in Hong Kong, and the geography shows up in the glass. Tell Camellia sources its own leaves from tea gardens there — hand-picked, then processed and fermented into the tea liqueurs that run through the drinks instead of sitting on top as a garnish. Gurung has said the point was never decoration:

My background is firmly rooted in Asia and thus, I continue to explore farms and local markets to source ingredients within the region.

That's a wider habit than one supply chain. It's the same instinct that sends him after puer earthiness, jasmine and smoked lapsang across the region rather than whatever a spirits rep can courier in by Friday — and it's the difference between a bar that stocks tea and one built around it.

The menu runs Teatails against T&Tonic, each drink named for its tea

Two lists sit side by side. Teatails are the bar's own inventions, built around a specific tea and often named for where it grows: Pa Pa Da pairs lapsang tea with sandalwood and dark rum; South of Jazz runs jasmine tea into tequila; Tea Time takes white peony tea into vodka with honey and fresh raspberry. T&Tonic is the more direct route — a tea, sencha or jasmine among them, blended into gin, redistilled, then finished with tonic. It's a format Tell Camellia effectively invented in this city and hasn't had to defend since — no serious tea-cocktail competitor has opened in Hong Kong in the six years since.

No. 23 in 2021 was the first appearance, then four years off the list

Tell Camellia's first Asia's 50 Best Bars appearance came fast — No. 23 on the 2021 list, barely eighteen months after opening, during a stretch when Hong Kong's bar scene was still finding its footing after 2020. It then dropped off the extended rankings entirely before this year's official re-entry at No. 81, a trajectory the list doesn't often produce. Bars that make an early impression and then lose the panel's attention rarely get a second look four years on. Tell Camellia did, and the panel's language — pioneer, not newcomer — suggests the absence read as a gap in coverage rather than a change in the room.

Gurung takes the tea programme on the road, into Singapore and beyond

In January 2025, Gurung ran a one-night guest shift at The Bar at 15 Stamford inside the Capitol Kempinski in Singapore, pouring four Teatails built for the room: Mango Sticky Rice, made with puer tea, mango sake, coconut and pandan; Fat Fat High, jasmine and yerba mate tea with duck fat and tequila; Warm Cloud, matcha, bourbon and sencha foam; and Smokey Affair, lapsang tea with porcini and cacao-infused bourbon. It's the kind of booking that says something about where a bar sits in the region's own estimation — not a promotional stunt but a programme another city's flagship hotel bar wanted for a single night. Gurung has also built a second Hong Kong bar, Barcode, and holds regional titles including a Bacardi Hong Kong top-four finish and a Chivas blending championship for Hong Kong — the kind of resume that puts a bar's tea programme in front of judges who've tasted everything else already.

It opens seven nights a week, from 6pm

Tell Camellia runs Monday to Sunday, 6pm to 2am, at Shop 2, LG/F, H Code, 45 Pottinger Street, Central. Bookings and questions go through the bar's own site or its Instagram — no third-party platform sits between the room and the person asking.