Bar Leone's Team Opens Bar Camillo at Rosewood Hong Kong on 25 November

The team behind Bar Leone, the bar the World's 50 Best Bars ranks number one on the planet, is opening a second Hong Kong room, and this one sits inside a hotel. Bar Camillo opens at Rosewood Hong Kong on Wednesday 25 November 2026, on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, built as an Italian living room with a Negroni trolley that is wheeled to your table. It is the second bar from Lorenzo Antinori and Justin Shun Wah, the pair who opened Bar Leone in 2023 and watched it climb to the top of the world list two years running.

Why does the Bar Leone team moving into a hotel matter?

Because two of the most decorated addresses in the business now share one bar. Bar Leone has held the number one spot on the World's 50 Best Bars list for two years, taking it first in 2025 and keeping it in 2026. Rosewood Hong Kong, across the water in Tsim Sha Tsui, topped the same organisation's World's 50 Best Hotels ranking in 2026. Hotel bars in this city are almost always run by the hotel. This one is run by the people who built the bar the rest of the trade measures itself against, and that swap is the whole story.

Rosewood's managing director framed it as a standalone bar's energy brought inside the hotel, and that is the exchange on the table. The hotel hands Antinori and Shun Wah a harbour-front terrace and a room most independent operators could never afford to build. The bar hands the hotel a reason for Hong Kong drinkers, not only house guests, to ride up to Salisbury Road on an ordinary Tuesday. Each side is betting that the half it is short of is the one that is actually scarce.

What is the Negroni trolley, and why build a bar around it?

A Negroni is three things in equal measure with nowhere to hide, which is exactly why bartenders use it to test each other. Bar Camillo hands that test to the table. You get a chit when you sit down and you pick the spirit, the garnish and the direction, floral, savoury or rich, and the drink is built in front of you off a dedicated trolley. It is theatre, but it is the honest kind: the one classic that cannot be faked, mixed where you can watch every pour.

The rest of the list runs in three movements. First the aperitivi di benvenuto, the welcome drinks you open with. Then the cocktail della casa, house creations that turn over with the season. Then a run of louder, more playful drinks for later. Four times a year the seasonal list is rebuilt around a single year in Italian culture, pulled from its music, its art and its design, so the bar has a reason to keep changing without chasing whatever is trending. It also gives a regular a reason to come back in spring for a menu that will be gone by summer.

What does the room actually look like?

The word the team keeps using is salotto, the Italian front room where the host, the padrone di casa, settles you in before anything else happens. The design is mid-century: glossy wood veneers, polished metal, mirrored walls, a palette of alpine green, gold and cream. A long banquette runs along the bar, and the terrace opens onto the harbour. The brief Antinori repeats is to strip the formality out of a hotel bar, to let people drink complicated things without sitting up straight to do it.

The bar even comes with a mascot. Camillo is a cartoon bartender the team describes as cheeky, lovable and a little clumsy, the fictional host whose character the room is meant to carry. It is a soft, knowing touch, and it tells you the thesis: a serious drinks team has decided the thing a hotel bar most needs to drop is its seriousness about itself.

The one classic that cannot be faked, mixed at your table off a trolley you helped load.

Where does Bar Camillo sit in Hong Kong's bar year?

In a strong one. The city holds the number one bar in the world and put seven rooms on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2026, and the people behind the best of them are opening, not shutting. Antinori's own trail reads like the recovery argument in a single career: Bar Leone in 2023, then Montana on Hollywood Road in 2025 with Simone Caporale, and now Bar Camillo at the end of 2026. Each is a different idea in a different room, not the same bar back under a new name.

It also lands in the middle of Hong Kong Gourmet Month, the city's November eating-and-drinking season, and a few weeks before Clockenflap fills the Central harbourfront in early December. If you are building a night that starts with a proper drink and a view, the calendar is unusually full right now, and a brand-new bar from the Bar Leone team on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront is a strong place to open one.

There is one more decision worth reading here, and it is the address. Bar Leone and Montana are both on Hong Kong Island; Bar Camillo crosses the water to Kowloon and faces the widest stretch of the harbour there is. For an Island drinker that is a reason to go through the tunnel, and for anyone staying in Tsim Sha Tsui or landing from the airport it is a world-class bar that does not ask them to cross at all. Which side of the water a bar opens on is a decision about who it is for, and putting this team on the Kowloon waterfront is a bet that the nights over here deserve to be taken as seriously as the ones in Central.

Can you book it yet, and what will it cost?

Not yet, and that is worth saying plainly. Bar Camillo opens on 25 November, so until then the only booking line is Rosewood's own. Mandos does not sell this room and will not pretend to. No drinks prices have been published, but set your expectations by the address: a harbour-front bar inside the hotel the world just ranked first is not a happy-hour proposition, and the Negroni service is built for a slower, sit-down evening rather than a quick round. If you want the house style before the new room opens, Bar Leone is on Hong Kong Island, and the full Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026 list is the clearest read on where the city's bars actually stand.

If you only do one thing on opening week, sit down early and let the trolley come to you: it is the single most Bar Camillo thing in the building. And if the group chat is still arguing about where to take out-of-town guests in late November, this is the screenshot that ends it.