Today’s everyone-welcome version of Long Bar was faithfully recreated through archival photos, and is matched with marble tables, stained glass and live jazz.
A ‘Seaman’s Fizz’ (Havana Club rum, rosemary-honey syrup, grapefruit juice, cream, egg white) commemorates the Shanghai Club’s 1956 changeover to the Seaman’s Club, but the ‘Colonel Sanders Margarita’, with bacon-infused tequila and homemade pineapple and lemongrass purée, pays homage to Long Bar’s wackier fast-food roots: in the room where that now disassembled bar once stood, the fried chicken-scented kitchen of Shanghai’s first KFC outpost debuted in 1989.
No. 42
Blue Moon
LOBSTER BAR AND GRILL AT ISLAND SHANGRI-LA, HONG KONG
Created by Paolo De Venuto
INGREDIENTS
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) Absolut vodka
25 ml (¾ fl oz) blue Curaçao
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) St-Germain liqueur
5 ml (1 teaspoon) absinthe
30 ml (1 fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) egg white
15 ml (½ fl oz) Cornflake Syrup*
1 cornflake, to garnish
*For the Cornflake Syrup (makes 2 litres/70 fl oz):
400 g (14 oz) cornflakes
2 litres (70 fl oz) mineral water
1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) caster (superfine) sugar
METHOD
For the Cornflake Syrup, combine the cornflakes and 1 litre (34 fl oz) of mineral water and mix with a hand-held blender. Strain the mixture, reserving the cornflakes and discarding the excess water. Place the cornflake pulp into a saucepan with the sugar over a medium heat and stir until dissolved. Cool the syrup and pour into a sterilised bottle. It will keep up to two weeks in the refrigerator.
To make the cocktail, dry shake all the ingredients with no ice or mix with a hand-held blender in a cocktail shaker for better foam. Shake again, then strain into a rocks glass over a single ice cube. Garnish with a cornflake.
There is no shortage of hotspots in Hong Kong and several of them are in hotels. Still, Lobster Bar and Grill is packed every night. A mainstay since opening at the Island Shangri-La, Hong Kong, in 1991 (stop in the lobby to regard the grandiose chandeliers), it has the attractive air of a cosmopolitan lounge, the kind of joint that present-day nightlife sees too little of. Well-worn, however, doesn’t mean stodgy. At least, not here.
One of the reasons Lobster Bar and Grill still resonates with so many is that there are rousing drinks on the thematic menus. On one that calls forth the 1933 James Hilton novel Lost Horizon, there is an Asian riff on the Gimlet, for instance, with apple liqueur, pomelo syrup and turmeric. An ingenious old fashioned (Michter’s bourbon, brown sugar, pink salt and chocolate) also gets the Far East treatment with the addition of toasted rice. Even a vodka Martini is reimagined here, with seaweed butter, oyster leaf and caviar stimulating lusty marine notes. A polite, outgoing staff, happy to engage in banter, only sweetens the evening.
Inspired by the green-blue river that weaves through the scenic Blue Moon Valley in Yunnan, China, bartender Paolo De Venuto created this drink. It’s whimsically bolstered by cornflakes – one of his favourite childhood snacks.
No. 43
Thaijito
THE BAMBOO BAR AT MANDARIN ORIENTAL, BANGKOK, THAILAND
INGREDIENTS
1 slice of fresh root ginger
1 slice of fresh lemongrass
3 wedges of lime
1 teaspoon brown sugar
60 ml (2 fl oz) Mekhong Thai Spirit
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) freshly squeezed lime juice
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) simple syrup
METHOD
Muddle the ginger, lemongrass, lime and brown sugar in the bottom of a rocks glass. Add crushed ice, then stir in the Mehkong, lime juice and simple syrup.
Thailand was still known as Siam when the Oriental, now part of the Mandarin Oriental collection, opened on the Chao Phraya River in 1876. As the kingdom’s first luxury hotel, it courted royalty, but a fair share of writers, such as W. Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, also camped out here. The Authors’ Lounge, coveted daily for afternoon tea, is an airy, white-washed shrine to that literary history. Guests who yearn for cocktails, not Darjeeling tea, know that the Bamboo Bar, at the other end of the hotel, awaits. Bangkok’s first jazz venue, it traces back to 1953. All these years later, it’s still the turf of musicians, only now they perform in a sleek room that retains its tropical modernist character with walls of glowing bottles and tiger print juxtaposed with rattan.
The Thaijito, a twist on the Mojito made with Thailand’s own Mehkong, a spirit that’s not quite a whiskey, not quite a rum, is quaffed regularly here, but the bar also conceives special menus, like the Compass. By trying drinks laced with ingredients such as cashew nuts, bee pollen and coconut flower, bar-goers take a sensory tour of Thailand.
SPOTLIGHT:
MENU DESIGN
flights of fancy to whet the appetite
SUM OF ITS PARTS
A room that leaves you breathless, or at least allows you to suspend a humdrum reality over the course of a Manhattan or two, and barkeeps who whip up cocktails with surprising combinations of ingredients are the hallmarks of great hotel bars. But hotel bars, given their power to eradicate everyday routines, can – and often do – push the envelope with their intricate narratives. Some might call this method novelty, but it’s merely succumbing to a personal idea of wonderland.
Entry to ROOM 309 at The Pottinger Hong Kong, for example, is invitation-only. At ‘reception’, a guest receives a key card that grants them access to the clandestine third-floor parlour. There, in a 22-seat den flaunting antique lion-head wood pillars, they choose from two different menus by Tasting Group’s Antonio Lai. One is devoted to Golden Key Classics like the French 75; the other to ‘invisible’ elixirs including the ‘Crystal Old Fashioned’ (peanut-butter bourbon, homemade wood-chip bitters, banana concentrate), listed, of
