How Hong Kong’s best hotel bars got hip: from Argo at the Four Seasons to Rosewood’s DarkSide, a new generation of five-star nightlife venues are redefining tired stereotypes
- Early pioneers Quinary and Stockton gave way to Please Don’t Tell (PDT) at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental – heralding today’s wave of destination-worthy haunts
- Inspired by Maxwell Parrish’s artwork in its New York namesake, the St. Regis bar features a striking mural by Chinese artist Zhang Gong
Hong Kong’s hotel bars can feel like some of the least romantic places on Earth. Often decorated in garish tones banished from the Pantone collection, they’re typically populated by weary travellers attempting to remember what time zone they’re in – at least pre-pandemic – and wondering whether the person on the opposite side of the bar is staring at them, or through them. Destination locations they are not.
That tired stereotype is fading away, though. Hong Kong’s hotel bars are now jostling at the forefront of the city’s cocktail culture. Five years ago, Island Shangri-La’s Lobster Bar and Grill was just about the only hotel bar of international repute. Now there is a clutch of contemporaries earning praise and raising standards across the city.
The turning point was the arrival of Please Don’t Tell (PDT) at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental in 2018. Its opening coincided with the rolling second wave of Hong Kong cocktail bars, inspired by pioneers Quinary and Stockton, which had opened in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
As the bar scene in Central started to become increasingly sophisticated, hotels realised they could not afford to be left behind. “(This competition) pushed hotels to strive and aim for more innovative and creative mixology to enable the hotel industry to compete with stand-alone bars,” says Felix Schnoering, assistant director of food and beverage at Island Shangri-La Hong Kong, who adds that hotel bars had developed “a perception as simply catering for hotel guests”.
“Successful free-standing bars brought hotels to rethink their offerings,” agrees Simone Rossi, beverage manager for DarkSide at the Rosewood Hong Kong, which opened in 2019 and is now ranked one of Asia’s 50 Best Bars.
In the past, most hotel bars had a very basic design and operated without a story to tell. Basically, they were bland by design. That way they could appeal to as many different visitors from as many different countries as possible. Increasingly, though, Hongkongers were looking for more since, “Being old and classic in a stiff environment is very boring,” says Rossi.
Such thinking is in evidence at The St. Regis, which came to Hong Kong in April 2019. A brand with a long history of taking its cocktails seriously – its King Cole Bar in New York claims to have invented the Bloody Mary – St. Regis considers its bars as signature outlets rather than “by-products of the dining experience” says Mario la Pietra, bar manager at The St. Regis Bar, Hong Kong.
