Where Shanghai Really Drinks

In Shanghai the bar is rarely where it claims to be. It's behind the bookshelf in a shop that sells nothing you'd buy, through a phone booth, down a corridor past a vending machine that doesn't vend. The city took the speakeasy — an American idea, and not an especially clever one — and pushed it so far past the point of necessity that the hiding became the personality. Nobody's fooled. That was never the point. The point is the small ceremony of the door, and the increasingly serious drinking on the other side of it. A decade in, Shanghai no longer drinks like a city trying on a trend. It drinks like one that took the thing apart and built something better out of the pieces.

Bars in Shanghai

Speak Low — Former French Concession

Every speakeasy scene has a grandfather, and Shanghai's is hidden behind a sliding bookshelf inside a bar-tools shop called OCHO on Fuxing Zhong Lu. Push the right shelf, climb the narrow brick tunnel, and you're inside the bar that set the standard.

It's the work of Shingo Gokan — the Japanese bartender who cut his teeth at Angel's Share in New York before opening this place in 2014 — and it has been a fixture on both the World's and Asia's 50 Best Bars lists for the better part of a decade, peaking at No. 10 in the world in 2017. The space stacks upward across several floors, each one quieter, pricier and more serious than the last: a house-party second floor, a hushed Japanese-style room above it, and a members-y level beyond that you'll need contacts to see.

Just book ahead, because the secret got out years ago and the line knows it.

Barules — Jing'an

For years, the legend of Barules was its door: a scarlet London phone booth on the corner of Fuxing and Fenyang that opened into a tin-roofed room widely considered the most honest speakeasy in the city. That version closed in 2020, and for a while Barules existed only in the memories of the people who'd queued for it.

Founder Sam Kuan brought it back in 2024, now tucked on Tongren Lu in the shadow of the Shanghai Centre in Jing'an. The phone booth is gone — these days it's an unmarked door spray-painted with the house creed, "Bartender is always right," and a portrait of the late, great Dick Bradsell standing guard. What survived is the thing that mattered: the drinks. The new Barules runs on "freestyle" cocktails — you're handed a roster of some 150 ingredients sorted into fruits, florals, herbs, tea, spices and savoury, and you build your own, choosing strength, fizz and sweetness while the bartender translates your whims into something you actually want to drink.

Flask — Former French Concession

Flask used to live behind a vintage Coca-Cola vending machine inside a sandwich shop, and that machine was one of the great entrances in Asian bar history. It's also gone. The original closed, and Flask resurfaced on Xiangyang Bei Lu, behind a bao joint called Tiger Bites, next door to Beef & Liberty. No Coke machine this time — just a hidden door.

What it is, is the most unapologetically fun bar on this list. Cocktails land in the 90-to-100-kuai range and arrive with a sense of theatre. Come early and it's a sleek lounge for a proper conversation. Stay late and the lights drop, the volume climbs, and it tips over into something closer to a nightclub.

Yoka Balance — Jing'an

After all the theatre, you'll want somewhere to exhale. Yoka Balance — written 鹤, crane — is that room: an intimate, Japanese-style bar on Shaanxi Bei Lu near Changping Lu.

There are no fish-eye mirrors here, no magic tricks. It's the Ginza model transplanted to Jing'an: meticulous, quiet, attentive, the sort of place where the ice is carved. Go when you want the city to slow down for an hour.

Asian Flush — Shanghai

The name is the joke — that telltale red glow a drink or two brings on — and the bar leans all the way in, crimson-lit and thoroughly pleased with itself. It's also the most interesting room in the city right now. Through what it calls a flavour reconstruction system, the menu turns durian distillate, white miso, Sichuan oolong, Thai tea and pandan soda into cocktails that taste like nowhere else, built from a larder most bars wouldn't know how to open. This is where the decade lands: a city that borrowed the speakeasy, outgrew it, and started making something that could only be Shanghai.