The Best Places to Eat and Drink in China

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.

The menu arrives formatted as an airplane boarding pass, which tells you most of what you need to know about Avant. Jerry Tian, formerly of Alinea in Chicago, runs this contemporary fine dining room in Nanshan with a borderless, hyper-seasonal kitchen that hopscotches cuisines without apology. Next door he operates a dessert shop with its own nine-course chef's table, because apparently one room wasn't enough.

A preserved radish puff shaped like a carrot, pulled from edible "soil" at the table, is a reasonable introduction to what this 40th-floor fine dining room is doing with Cantonese cooking. The team leans into obscure Guangdong ingredients and labor-intensive technique without the usual white-tablecloth severity, which takes some doing at this altitude. Rare regional fare, playful forms, and a Buddha's hand chocolate that somehow makes sense.

Silk chandeliers and vintage collectibles set the mood in this dimly lit, courtyard-style Chiu Chow restaurant in Futian, where the kitchen follows the 24 solar terms as a guide to what's on the plate. The team, mostly Chaoshan natives, leans into heritage recipes and lu shui marinated dishes with a seasonal, back-to-basics discipline. A South China Morning Post 100 Top Tables pick, it draws the kind of crowd that arrives knowing exactly what to order.

A Cantonese dining room inside the Mandarin Oriental Shenzhen, where the menu spans Lingnan and Chaoshan traditions as though the two had never been separated. Chef Fei has spent decades in this cuisine, and the kitchen handles both an elaborate dim sum lunch and evening plates like crispy eel with osmanthus honey without breaking a sweat. The kind of room where the steamed BBQ pork buns alone could anchor the afternoon.

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.