The 32 Best Places to Drink 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.

A cocktail bar on Nanchang Road where the design philosophy comes from Virgil Abloh's 3% rule: change an existing thing by just that much and it becomes something new. The shelves hold a select few bottles, the lighting is considered, and nothing extra survives the edit. The drinks menu is equally spare, which either feels like restraint or curation depending on your mood, but the room makes a strong argument for less.

You walk into Barules through a scarlet London phone box, which sets the tone nicely. Inside, this cocktail bar pays quiet tribute to the craft, with portraits of bartending legends lining the walls and glass cabinets full of cocktail kit. The menu leans fresh and fruit-forward rather than classical, which surprises you given all the reverence on display. A bar for people who know the names on those portraits and enjoy the slight irony of ordering something bright and tropical beneath them.

A retro Coca-Cola vending machine in what looks like an abandoned sandwich shop turns out to be the door, which is exactly the kind of entrance Flask deserves. The bar sits behind it down a narrow brick passage that fire marshals would probably prefer not to know about. It's the sort of cocktail bar that makes you feel briefly like a genius for finding it, then immediately guilty for telling anyone.

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 two-storey glazed brewing tower rises through the center of this hotel microbrewery bar, and the smell of yeasty mash greets you before you've found a seat. The brewing kit gives the sleek, woven-brick room something to look at besides itself, and a retro motorcycle with sidecar, pool table, and big screens do the work of keeping it from feeling like a lobby concept. Good for an unplanned second round.

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.

Tucked into the first floor of an apartment block on Wukang Lu, this cocktail bar commits to a decorating scheme where Qing dynasty meets Louis XVI, with gilt, lacquer, velvet in purple and scarlet, lion heads, and birdcages all arriving at once. The menu balances house originals against classics like the Bramble and Sidecar, though the room has already done most of the theatrical heavy lifting before your drink arrives.

A craft brewery bar spread across three floors of Sinan Mansions, Boxing Cat is where Shanghai's American expat crowd discovered they didn't have to drink watered-down lager forever. Exposed brick, leather sofas, outdoor seating, a pool table, and table football upstairs give the place a cheerfully unfussy feel. Big screens run movies on the lower floor while the wifi-dependent tap away at laptops. The house-brewed beers are the whole point.