The 18 Best Cocktail Bars in China

Soy sauce in a martini garnish is the kind of move that either makes you put down your phone or pick it up to photograph the menu. Hope & Sesame is a Cantonese cocktail bar that runs sous-vide infusions and centrifuges alongside familiar pantry flavors from the region, landing on Asia's 50 Best Bars at number seven and the World's 50 Best Bars at twenty-nine. The room has expanded recently, which tells you something about how the city feels about it.

On the 79th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, this cocktail bar trades in vertigo and seasonal menus built around traditional Chinese solar terms, which is a more poetic organizing principle than most places manage. The current menu maps each season to a drink, fermented rose jam and buckwheat for autumn, Fenghuang dancong tea for spring. It holds a spot on Asia's 50 Best Bars list, and the crowd up here knows it.

A cocktail bar that doubles as a scavenger hunt: find Tipsy, the secret bar hidden somewhere in the building, and you've earned bragging rights for the evening. Sober Company runs three floors of drinking and eating, but Sober Society is the heart of it, where the team behind Speak Low works through a menu of cocktails built around Chinese ingredients. It has landed on Asia's 50 Best Bars list, which tracks.

Checkered tiles, timber walls, and green leather stools that look like a diner lost its passport and ended up in Huangpu. Pony Up is an all-day bar on Jinxian Road, open from early afternoon so the post-lunch crowd has somewhere respectable to be. The signature Cigar cocktail layers vermouth, absinthe, and a house smoke-infused spirit. Asia's 50 Best Bars has it on their Discovery list.

You enter through a sliding bookshelf inside a cocktail equipment shop, which sets the tone nicely. This three-floor cocktail bar from Shingo Gokan has long since shed any real secrecy, but the ritual of getting in still earns its keep. The second floor is where the serious drinking happens; the top floor, rare whiskies and a members-only door. The crowd knows what it ordered before it sits down.

A two-floor steampunk cocktail bar inside the Ping An Finance Center, Obsidian has a whisky display case stocked with autographed Highland malts and rare Japanese spirits that functions as its own argument for staying past midnight. The ground floor wraps around an open kitchen; upstairs, riveted windows frame the Shenzhen skyline and high-backed armchairs encourage the kind of drinking that becomes a whole evening. Guest shifts from visiting bartenders keep the programme rotating.

The 34-metre bar counter was painstakingly rebuilt from old photographs after the building's last tenant, somewhat anticlimactically, was a KFC. This cocktail bar inside the Waldorf Astoria on the Bund channels old Shanghai with enough conviction that the gap in the timeline barely registers. The room feels like it has always been here, which is either a triumph of restoration or a very good illusion, and at this point the distinction hardly matters.

Dial zero on the retro telephone tucked inside El Ocho and a door opens into a 17-seat cocktail bar where there is no menu, only a conversation. The bartender listens, then builds something to order, while hot towels and crystal water glasses set a register closer to Tokyo than Shanghai. The passion here is personal in a way a larger room could never sustain.

A warren of mirror-lined rooms on the third floor of Zhang Yuan, this cocktail bar runs on velvet seats, low light, and a sunken bar that makes the whole place feel like a speakeasy someone actually finished decorating. The menu skews classical, organized by Old-Fashioneds, Flips, Tiki, and the rest, with dark spirits leading the charge. The name is Spanish for eight, which is lucky, which the Chinese know, which means the odds are already in your favor.