What makes a Havana mojito so special, and how Hong Kong’s best mojitos compare

Whatever the other implications of the US normalising relations with Cuba may be, one thing is certain – the already busy bartenders at La Bodeguita Del Medio are going to be mixing even more mojitos.

That small, scruffy bar in old Havana’s Empedrado Street claims to be the birthplace of the one of the world’s most popular cocktails – although that is subject to dispute, as is the authenticity of a framed fragment displayed in the bar, supposedly in Hemingway’s handwriting, which says simply “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita”.

Whether or not he ever said or wrote that, there’s not much doubt that Hemingway was an enthusiastic patron of both bars. They are about equidistant from an apartment he occupied, which now houses a museum dedicated to him. If he drank half as many mojitos and daiquiris as the legend maintains, it’s a small miracle that he was ever sober enough to write.

La Bodeguita doesn’t hammer the Hemingway link quite as hard as El Floridita, which has a life-sized bronze statue of the great man leaning on the bar, but it is emphatic about its ownership of the mojito.

It claims that the mojito was created there in 1942 when the bar was called the Casa Martinez, and that a craze for it swept Havana.

However, there is evidence that the mojito, or something very like it, has been in existence in the Caribbean for centuries.