This is a big year for the Asian bar industry. For the first time ever, the World’s 50 Best Bars finale will be hosted in Asia, scheduled for Singapore this October. Another first was just marked, however, with the first-ever hosting in Hong Kong of Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2023, that I attended a few days ago. Another hallmark is the fact that this was the first full-scale gathering of the bar community in Asia since 2019. Attracted by a slew of events in the run-up to the finale — mostly in the nature of bar takeovers by some of the bar world’s most eminent personalities and bars — this had the added advantage of exposing me to a number of diverse venues across Hong Kong that I might normally have not visited, from izakayas (Japanese style drinking houses) to scrappy dive bars and speakeasies such as The Aubrey at the Mandarin Oriental - Izakaya, Quality Goods Club - Dive Bar, The Pontiac - all round fun bar, among others,
Let me circle back first, to a 2018 visit to the city and a chat with my go-to man for bar recommendations — Dev Sehgal, a Hong Kong bar veteran who has been in the city for a decade and as insiders say, the OG of Hong Kong bars. Currently the beverage manager at the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong, and for several years before that, he was the bar manager of 8 1/2 Otto E Mezzo Bombana, the only Italian restaurant outside of Italy to get three Michelin stars. You must visit Coa, he says. A coa, if you are curious, is a long-specialised tool used to harvest agave, the plant that is then used to make agave spirits like mezcal and tequila. Coa, the bar launched in 2017, is not easy to find. With the words ‘Coa’ written in an extremely small font on a brick wall outside the bar, it whispers, rather than shouts its presence in Central Hong Kong.
