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Robin Lynam

Checking out the cocktail scene around the Hollywood Road/Wyndham Street strip gets more interesting by the week. New places with fresh ideas keep opening, offering a huge range of experimental cocktails - many of them unique to a particular bar.
Not all the experiments work, but many do, and customers are increasingly demanding bartenders to show the sort of creativity they expect in cutting-edge restaurants.

Meeting that challenge head-on is one of the newer venues in the area, The Woods, in the basement of 17 Hollywood Road, which opened in July.
"There are three main points to what we do," says founder and managing director Victoria Chow, who is also the originator of many of the cocktail recipes.
"Fresh and seasonal ingredients, artisanal liquors and food paired with the drink rather than drinks paired with the food. Hong Kong people love their food, and the truth is it takes as much work and attention to the details to make a cocktail as it takes to make a dish."
Among the "artisanal" small-batch distillers whose products The Woods uses are London's Sipsmith, which makes premium gins and vodkas, and Michter's of Louisville, Kentucky, which makes rye, bourbon and sour mash American whiskeys.
"We do have a surge of importers bringing in artisanal liquors and smaller-brand distilleries, although London and New York are already way ahead of the curve," she says.
Fruits, vegetables, herbs and fresh juices made daily are big features of The Woods' style, and year-round signature cocktails include a beet Negroni and a four-pepper margarita. Much of the produce is sourced from the local market, and some is home-grown.

The bar also offers a seasonal cocktail menu, and at its prix-fixe bar, which seats eight, food is matched to four house speciality cocktails - the gin basil smash, the bacon bourbon, the absinthe floss and the jasmine and gin tea infusion - for HK$688 per head. Advance booking for that menu is essential.
"Our cocktails are definitely more out of the ordinary in terms of flavour profiles," Chow says. "For example, on our autumn menu right now, we have a purple yam rum or a butternut squash rye whiskey cocktail called butternut rye. A couple of years ago, those would have been a huge risk. I think people are very open-minded now. They want to know what more can be done with the drink."
Probably nobody has done more to broaden the horizons of Hong Kong bartenders and barflies than Antonio Lai, most recently in the three bars he co-owns with Tastings and Angel's Share founder Charlene Dawes - Quinary at 56-58 Hollywood Road, Origin at 48 Wyndham Street and the latest, The Envoy, in the new Pottinger Hotel.
Each offers a unique cocktail experience. At Origin, which has hard-to-find small-batch gins, Lai redistills and infuses his own with flavours such as basil, orange and grapefruit.

He also developed a list of signature cocktails for The Envoy, including the love it-or-loathe it but certainly distinctive Dinosaur, the ingredients for which include vodka infused with condensed milk, chocolate liqueur and - improbably - Milo powder.
The Envoy is also notable for its collection of vintage spirits, with bottles dating back decades to a time when many well-known brands were made with different formulas than their modern counterparts, as well as for its collection of unusual glasses.
Quinary, ranked No 42 in Drinks International's "The World's 50 Best Bars 2014", is Hong Kong's only presence on that prestigious list, and it's the place to go for Lai's famous and perhaps more generally accessible Earl Grey tea martini.
The use of tea infusions in cocktails has become something of a Hong Kong trend, and is a signature at Chachawan at 206 Hollywood Road, one of a growing number of restaurants where the cocktails share the spotlight with the food. A house speciality is the Chapolitan, a mixture of pomegranate, calamansi and mint muddled with triple sec, 42 Below vodka and a salted mandarin oolong tea foam.
"I have brought together flavours that the people of Hong Kong enjoy - the infused teas and Isaan [Thai] cuisine - and merged them all into modern cocktails," says bar manager Tunny Grattidge.

Having a list of unusual spirits, bitters and liqueurs has become an important area of distinction for the new generation of cocktail bars, such as Rummin' Tings at 28 Hollywood Road with its speciality rum cocktails such as the calypso punch, and Fatty Crab at 11 Old Bailey Street, which is waving the Mexican flag for Mezcal.
"It is a spirit that is wrongly perceived as being similar to tequila and consumed as a shot, but has so much complexity, depth and flavour to it, making it an exceptional ingredient for a cocktail," says Fatty Crab's Rohit Roopchand, who recommends the Blind Date - a shaken mix of Mezcal Amores, aperol, lemon juice, sugar syrup, raspberry and mint leaves.
The bars around Hollywood Road have also prompted established cocktail outlets elsewhere to raise their game. On the other side of the harbour at One Peking Road, Aqua Spirit has introduced a new range of classic cocktail-based drinks, but using small-batch spirits such as TRU organic vodkas, IXA organic tequila and home-made juices and syrups.
For those who prefer to taste a variety of small drinks rather than linger over one substantial glass, the new "craft cocktails" will be available in flights of three priced at HK$328.
 


Do me a flavour

Oak whiskey sour at The Woods. The bar puts as much attention into its cocktails as it does into its dishes.

Fatty Crab's blind date

Chachawan's chapolitan cocktail

Rummin' Tings' Calypso Punch

Caribbean-inspired bar Rummin' Tings

Magazines

Good Eating

Ingredients such as tea infusions, fruits, vegetables and herbs are used to make enticing drinks, writes Robin Lynam


Ingredients such as tea infusions, fruits, vegetables and herbs are used to make enticing drinks, writes Robin Lynam.


Do me a flavour

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Ingredients such as tea infusions, fruits, vegetables and herbs are used to make enticing drinks, writes Robin Lynam

Ingredients such as tea infusions, fruits, vegetables and herbs are used to make enticing drinks, writes Robin Lynam