The Best Bars To Visit In Hong Kong

Hong Kong is always slightly ahead of the curve. With its buzzing food scene, bar culture, hikes, skyscrapers, a whole freaking DisneyLand, it’s hard to exactly pin down the city. It moves too fast for that — always in motion, always flirting with invention. One week you’re drinking cocktails in a laundry-themed speakeasy, the next you’re sipping tea-infused gin in a bar behind a toilet (yes, really).

But that’s Hong Kong — it’s never just one thing. It’s high and low, sacred and stupid, luxury and chaos. You can start your night surrounded by Italian football jerseys and end it in a jazz bar pretending you understand the sax solo. You’ll meet bartenders who talk about cocktails like they’re writing love letters, and locals who swear the best drink in town still comes in a plastic cup.

Best Bars in Hong Kong

So here’s a list. For a slightly blurry, beautifully chaotic crawl through a city that knows how to pour a drink.

Bar Leone

If Rome and Hong Kong had a baby, it’d look like Bar Leone. Lorenzo Antinori has made a religion out of simplicity — no smoke, no drama, just perfect cocktails that feel like they’ve been kissed by God. Recently named the Best Bar In The World in 2025, here, the walls are littered with Vatican kitsch, vintage football shirts, photos of Popes — it’s messy in the way great nights out usually are. There’s mortadella, loud laughter, and a Negroni so divine you could almost cry into it. When Lorenzo’s behind the bar, the energy teeters on riotous. Definitely a must-visit.

COA

There’s no such thing as a quiet drink at COA. Jay Khan runs this agave cathedral with the fervour of a preacher. The 41-page menu could double as a textbook — mezcals, raicillas, charandas. The light’s low, the walls hum with Mexican folklore, and the crowd is equal parts cocktail nerds and lost tourists who’ve just found the “hidden gem”. Three years at the top of Asia’s 50 Best hasn’t killed the buzz here at all.

Penicillin

Sustainability sounds boring until you’ve had a drink at Penicillin. Agung Prabowo and Roman Ghale have built a zero-waste ecosystem here. You walk through a lab where fruit scraps ferment and bottles are reborn. The tables are made from fallen typhoon trees. Every cocktail has a story — about where it came from, who grew it, and what it’s trying to heal.

Dr. Fern’s Gin Parlour

At Dr. Fern’s, you don’t order a drink, you get diagnosed. The new “Doctor’s Residence” hides behind a door that looks like a clinic — a tongue-in-cheek bit of theatre that gives way to Hong Kong’s most psychedelic gin bar. Over 400 gins line the walls, and the drinks are laced with madness: squid ink, jellyfish collagen, candied bacon. It’s full apothecary chic.

Lockdown

Across from Penicillin, Lockdown hides behind what looks like a public toilet — which is either genius or insanity, depending on how much you’ve had. Inside, though, it’s pure warmth. Bartenders greet you like an old mate, pour you drinks made from 1970s Cognac. It’s the kind of place that turns one drink into six.

Dead Poets

A bar named Dead Poets sounds pretentious, but this Soho gem is anything but. Drinks are cheekily inspired by the 27 Club — Hendrix, Winehouse, Joplin — all priced around HKD80, which in Central is practically a steal. The space is small, the playlist is loud, and the staff treat you like you’ve stumbled into someone’s afterparty. It’s messy, honest, and very lit.

Ping Pong 129 Gintonería

Down a red door in Sai Ying Pun, Ping Pong 129 still holds its own as one of Hong Kong’s most effortlessly cool bars. It used to be a ping pong hall, and you can still feel the echoes of the sport in its echoey, concrete shell. The G&Ts are crisp, the neon light flattering, and the tapas dangerously good. Just go there to get drunk.

Tell Camellia

Tea, but make it filthy. Tell Camellia turns tea leaves into poetry — jasmine-infused gins, smoky pu’er whiskies, ceylon-and-rice hybrids that make you rethink what a cocktail even is. For a city that runs on caffeine, it makes poetic sense that its best bar runs on tea.

Tai Lung Fung

Tai Lung Fung is the closest thing to drinking inside a Wong Kar-wai frame. Pink neon, peeling walls, and a playlist straight out of 1999. Cocktails riff on old Hong Kong classics — milk tea, preserved plum, red bean — and somehow, it all works. You could come here alone and not feel alone at all.