The Savory Project

The drinks are built like dishes, not like drinks

Time Out described the arc of a night here as sipping a biryani, a plate of pickled ginger and a Thai beef salad, in liquid form. Order the Thai Beef Salad and what lands is rum built on clarified beef stock, coconut and kaffir lime, finished with chilli — a cocktail engineered to read as the dish it's named for. The Biryani layers tequila with ghee and masala. The Peppercorn rebuilds a Bloody Mary from tomato, cumin and MSG rather than vodka and tabasco. The Teriyaki pairs tequila with white soy sauce, honey and masa maize flour. None of it treats savoury as a novelty garnish on a sweet drink — it's the whole premise. The bar's own framing, at launch, was that Hong Kong drinkers had spent years asking for less sugar, not more, and the menu is the answer to that request rather than a stunt built around it.

The bar comes from the team that built Coa

The Savory Project is the second project from the founding team behind Coa, the agave-spirits bar on Shin Hing Street that held Asia's No.1 spot three years running, 2021 through 2023, and still sits at No.24 on the 2026 list, where the same team took the Rémy Martin Legend of the List Award — a prize built for a body of work rather than a single strong year. Where Coa organises roughly 200 bottles of tequila and mezcal into a 41-page menu, this second room inverts the brief: instead of a spirit-first list, it runs a savoury-first one, drinks assembled the way a kitchen assembles a plate rather than the way a bar assembles a pour.

The Savory Project has ranked on Asia's 50 Best Bars three years running

The bar opened in Soho toward the end of May 2023. In 2024 it took Time Out Hong Kong's Rising Star Award and the London Essence Best New Opening Award at the Asia's 50 Best Bars ceremony. In 2025 it placed No.32 on Asia's 50 Best Bars and No.86 on the World's 50 Best Bars. This year it returned on the extended 51–100 list at No.60, published 14 July 2026 alongside two other Hong Kong bars, The Opposites at No.54 and Tell Camellia at No.81 — three straight years of recognition from the region's most-watched bar ranking.

Less sugar, more umami — a bar built on a request Hong Kong drinkers kept making.

The room is built around a hexagonal bar

The design leans on warm timber and stone, with a hexagonal bar at the centre of a room small enough that low seating puts tables close together by design rather than by accident. It's built for a group of four or six working through a shared menu, not for a crowd standing three deep at the rail — the shape of the room does some of the work the menu does, keeping the person mixing the drink and the person drinking it within talking distance.

The Thai Beef Salad is clarified, not blended

The technique under the signature drink is the detail worth knowing. Rather than blending peanut into the mix, the bar clarifies it — running a peanut liquid through a filter until it runs clear, then building the drink on that base with clarified beef stock, coconut and kaffir lime. The result pours clean rather than cloudy or heavy, with the umami arriving after the first sip and the Bird's-eye chilli finishing it. The Mala Punch runs the same logic in a different direction — Sichuan peppercorn, mint, passion fruit and fermented beans, built for heat and citrus rather than umami depth.

The Gari Gari borrows its name from a sushi garnish

Gari is the thin pickled ginger served alongside sushi, and the cocktail named for it combines passion fruit, Japanese whisky, ponzu, malic acid and soda water, built over ice and finished with a slice of the ginger itself. It's built to drink fast and cold, and it sits at the lighter end of a menu weighted mostly toward heavier, food-adjacent flavours — the palate reset between courses on a longer visit.

Non-drinkers get their own menu, not a substitution

The bar runs a full Temperance menu — non-alcoholic drinks built with the same savoury logic as the cocktail list, rather than a diluted stand-in for whatever a drinker at the same table has ordered. It's a small choice that says something about who the room is designed for: a table where not everyone is drinking shouldn't mean half the table gets an afterthought.

Doors open six nights, from 6pm

Tuesday to Saturday, 6pm to 1am; Sunday, 6pm to midnight; closed Monday. The bar is at 4 Staunton Street in Soho, Central, and it remained in active rotation through mid-2026 — named in the Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026 extended list in July, and carried in the South China Morning Post's 100 Top Tables 2026 guide. Next door, a standing collaboration with Fiata lets a table order pizza without leaving its seats.