The 20 Best Cocktail Bars in Asia
Same discipline as the first two volumes. The backbone here is Asia's 50 Best Bars 2025, sponsored by Perrier, revealed at a live ceremony at Wynn Palace, Macau, on 15 July 2025 — the tenth edition of a ranking run by the same organisation and voting-academy methodology behind The World's 50 Best Restaurants. Bars from 20 towns and cities across the region were considered this year, with 20 new entries and two re-entries reshuffling the pack considerably. We've taken the top 20, in their exact order, with the detail below — house specials, history, design, the people behind the bar — drawn from 50 Best's own reporting rather than invented for atmosphere.
Worth saying plainly: this is a ranking of bars, not of cities, so the list leans hard into wherever Asia's serious bar talent currently is — which this year means Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul and a strong showing from Kuala Lumpur, alongside genuine surprises like a coconut-grove bar in Sri Lanka and a converted opium den above one of Bangkok's best restaurants. A few of these need real effort to find — hidden entrances, unmarked doors, lifts to unlabelled floors are something of a house style across the list. That's deliberate, not an oversight.
No. 1 — Bar Leone
Hong Kong
The room at Bar Leone. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. The first bar in the ranking's history to debut at No.1, back in 2024 — and in 2025 it holds the position, along with the titles of Best Bar in Hong Kong and Best Bar in Asia. Bar Leone reads on the surface like a Roman aperitivo transplant, but that undersells what's actually happening: a rigorous, almost monastic focus on speed, simplicity and consistency, executed at a level that makes "simple" look considerably harder than it sounds. The Filthy Martini, made with smoked olive brine, has become close to a signature; so has the now-famous mortadella focaccia, proof that a bar's best-known dish doesn't need to be a cocktail at all.
The detail: Bar Leone was the first bar ever to debut on Asia's 50 Best Bars list at No.1 — an unprecedented feat in the ranking's history.
Order: the Filthy Martini, and the mortadella focaccia on the side, no matter what else you get.
No. 2 — Zest
Seoul
Service at the bar at Zest. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Led by a quartet of Korean bar heavyweights, Zest is the current clearest answer to the question "what does a genuinely modern Korean bar look like?" The compact menu majors on regional ingredients rarely seen behind a bar anywhere else — the Jeju Garibaldi, built from Jeju's specialty oranges and Gujwa village carrots, is as much a geography lesson as a drink. Named Best Bar in Korea 2025.
The detail: the Jeju Garibaldi cocktail sources its carrots specifically from Gujwa village on Jeju Island — an ingredient provenance most restaurants, let alone bars, don't bother with.
Order: the Jeju Garibaldi, for the clearest single expression of what the bar is trying to do.
No. 3 — Jigger & Pony
Singapore
The room at Jigger & Pony. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. From humble beginnings on Amoy Street to its current, considerably more sumptuous home inside the Amara Hotel, Jigger & Pony has landed in the top 10 of Asia's 50 Best Bars for seven consecutive rankings — a run of consistency almost nothing else on this list can match. Drinks are served inside rotating "menuzines," part cocktail list, part small magazine, ranging from the heirloom-tomato-based Ugly Tomatoes to the more theatrical Smashing Sundae. Named Best Bar in Singapore 2025.
The detail: the bar has held a top-10 position for seven straight editions of the ranking — the longest sustained run of excellence on this entire list.
Order: whatever's newest in the current "menuzine" — the format changes often enough that repeat visits rarely repeat a drink.
No. 4 — Bar Us
Bangkok
The room at Bar Us. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Walk in and you could be forgiven for thinking you've wandered into an experimental laboratory rather than a bar — near-black interiors, theatrical spotlighting, a team dressed in clinical white lab coats. Bar Us borrows its structure directly from fine dining: the menu is split into starters, mains, afters, and a separate all-night section built around twists on the classics, applying tasting-menu logic to a night of drinking. Named Best Bar in Thailand 2025.
The detail: the drinks menu is structured exactly like a fine-dining tasting menu — starters, mains, afters — rather than a conventional cocktail list.
Order: start with whatever the "starters" section suggests and let the sequence do the rest of the work.
No. 5 — Dry Wave Cocktail Studio
Bangkok
The room at Dry Wave Cocktail Studio. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Open since January 2024 in Bangkok's Thonglor district, Dry Wave has made an unusually fast climb: 2024's Campari One To Watch Award, followed by a storming debut straight into the top five in 2025, earning the Disaronno Highest New Entry Award along the way. The whole concept is built around duality — pairs of contrasting ideas, flavours or textures worked into a single glass — delivered with a self-consciously cool, high-design attitude that Bangkok's bar scene has increasingly made its calling card.
The detail: Dry Wave went from winning a "One to Watch" award in 2024 to a top-five debut just one year later — one of the fastest rises in the ranking's recent history.
Order: ask the bar team to build you something around their "duality" concept rather than ordering off a fixed list — that's genuinely the point of the place.
No. 6 — Bar Cham
Seoul
The team, in the room at Bar Cham. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Slide open the wooden door and you're inside Byung-Jin "BJ" Lim's quietly confident cocktail haven, built almost entirely around native Korean spirits sourced from provinces across the country rather than the usual international back-bar staples. It's a serious, softly lit room with a serious point to make: that Korea's own regional distilling traditions deserve the same reverence a bar might normally reserve for Scotch or Cognac.
The detail: the back bar is built predominantly around Korean regional spirits sourced province by province — an unusually nationalist wine-list-style approach applied to spirits.
Order: ask for whatever's newest from the bar's rotating selection of provincial Korean spirits — that's the entire reason to come.
No. 7 — Hope & Sesame
Guangzhou
The team, in the room at Hope & Sesame. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Opened in 2016 as the first speakeasy in southern China, Hope & Sesame brought serious cocktail technique to a market that had, until then, stayed fairly traditional — and its drinks still go big on flavour and genuine playfulness, epitomised by a savoury Truffle Banana Bread cocktail that sounds like a joke and isn't one. Co-founder Andrew Ho was named recipient of the Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award 2025 — recognition voted on by other bartenders, which tends to mean more than most industry prizes. Named Best Bar in Mainland China.
The detail: Hope & Sesame was the first speakeasy to open anywhere in southern China, in 2016 — it effectively created the category locally.
Order: the Truffle Banana Bread, precisely because it sounds like it shouldn't work.
No. 8 — Lair
New Delhi
The room, mid-service at Lair. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. A modern speakeasy built as a direct homage to 1920s Prohibition-era hideouts — dim lighting, earthy décor, a deliberately secretive atmosphere designed to slow a night down rather than speed it up. Lair's a new entry this year, arriving straight in as Best Bar in India 2025, and its rise says something real about the current state of Delhi's cocktail scene, which has spent the last several years catching up fast to Mumbai and Bengaluru.
The detail: Lair debuted on the list this year and immediately claimed the Best Bar in India title — a new entry and a national win in the same edition.
Order: anything built around the Prohibition-era classics the room is designed to evoke — that's the entire mood being sold here.
No. 9 — Bar Benfiddich
Tokyo
The room at Bar Benfiddich. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Take a nondescript elevator to the ninth floor of an unremarkable Tokyo commercial building and step out into what can only be described as an apothecary from a parallel universe. Hiroyasu Kayama — something of a bartending icon in Japan — grows much of the produce used behind the bar on his own family farm, and builds drinks around foraged botanicals, herbs and roots more commonly associated with traditional medicine than mixology. Named Best Bar in Japan 2025.
The detail: many of the botanicals used behind the bar are grown on Kayama's own family farm — this is closer to a working apothecary than a conventional bar programme.
Order: let Kayama or his team choose for you based on what's currently in season from the farm — a fixed cocktail list rather undersells what's actually happening here.
No. 10 — Penrose
Kuala Lumpur
The team, in the room at Penrose. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Opened in August 2022, Penrose is built around functionalism and restraint rather than spectacle — every drink constructed against five explicit pillars: alcohol, flavour, taste, body and dilution. It's a technical, almost engineering-minded approach to the classics, resulting in cocktails that feel less like creative flourishes and more like carefully solved equations. Named Best Bar in Malaysia 2025.
The detail: the bar's entire cocktail programme is built around five explicitly named technical pillars rather than a looser creative brief — a genuinely engineering-minded approach to mixology.
Order: a classic, to see the five-pillar philosophy applied at its most legible.
No. 11 — Argo
Hong Kong
The room at Argo. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Argo poses an uncomfortable, genuinely interesting question: what will we be drinking when the ingredients bars currently take for granted become scarce due to climate change? Its answer comes in the form of "single-element" drinks — pineapple honey, jasmine-infused pineapple, pineapple tomato shrub — built entirely from Asian produce increasingly at climate risk, turning a cocktail list into something closer to an environmental essay.
The detail: the menu is explicitly framed around Asian ingredients under threat from climate change — a cocktail list with genuine environmental research behind it.
Order: any of the single-element pineapple-based drinks — the whole concept is best understood by tasting how much complexity comes from one ingredient, handled several different ways.
No. 12 — Modernhaus
Jakarta
The room at Modernhaus. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Opened in May 2024 and already the fastest possible success story: Best Bar in Indonesia 2025 and the Three Cents Best New Opening Award, both within its first full year. The trick is atmosphere over ambition — walking in feels less like entering a serious cocktail bar and more like being invited into a well-dressed friend's living room, all warm lighting and relaxed service rather than the stiff formality bars this good often default to.
The detail: Modernhaus won both Best Bar in Indonesia and Best New Opening in the same year it opened — a genuinely rare double.
Order: whatever the team is currently excited about — the relaxed, conversational service style here is built for exactly that kind of recommendation.
No. 13 — Alice
Seoul
Service at the bar at Alice. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Named for the Lewis Carroll classic, and it commits to the bit completely — finding the hidden entrance is the first puzzle, and what's inside is a genuinely imaginative, seasonally shifting menu built around the logic of Wonderland rather than conventional cocktail categories. Alice jumped an extraordinary 33 places from its 2024 ranking, earning it the Nikka Highest Climber Award 2025 — the single biggest jump on this year's list.
The detail: Alice climbed 33 places in a single year, the largest jump anywhere on the 2025 ranking.
Order: whichever seasonal special is currently running — the menu is explicitly designed to reward repeat visits across the year.
No. 14 — Smoke & Bitters
Hiriketiya, Sri Lanka
The room at Smoke & Bitters. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. A two-and-a-half-hour drive from Colombo, tucked into a coconut grove in the surf town of Hiriketiya, Smoke & Bitters is single-handedly responsible for putting Sri Lanka on the global cocktail map. Its entire programme stays locked onto Sri Lankan spirits and ingredients, with house-made syrups and tinctures doing most of the heavy lifting — proof that a genuinely great bar doesn't need to be anywhere near a capital city. Named Best Bar in Sri Lanka 2025.
The detail: the bar sits inside a coconut grove roughly two and a half hours outside Colombo — one of the most remote locations of any bar on this entire list.
Order: anything built from the bar's house-made Sri Lankan syrups and tinctures — that's the whole reason to make the drive.
No. 15 — Three X Co
Kuala Lumpur
The room at Three X Co. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. A genuine pioneer of KL's speakeasy movement, hidden — appropriately — behind a working barbershop inside the Bangsar Shopping Centre. The room mixes chinoiserie elegance with an easy, unpretentious charm, and its drinks are tied to specific characters and personas, like the lychee-martini riff Whimsy Wabbit, which arrives with its own small jade jelly rabbit garnish.
The detail: the entrance is a fully operational barbershop — the bar itself is only reachable by walking through it.
Order: the Whimsy Wabbit, mostly for the jade jelly rabbit that comes with it.
No. 16 — CMYK
Changsha
The team, in the room at CMYK. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Named for the four primary printing colours, CMYK is Changsha's clearest statement yet that China's regional bar scenes are producing genuinely world-class work well outside Shanghai and Beijing. Expect technically advanced cocktails delivered with real visual flair — a menu built as much around colour theory as flavour theory, appropriate for a bar named after a printing process.
The detail: the bar's entire naming and visual concept is drawn directly from the CMYK printing colour model — an unusually literal design conceit, fully carried through in the drinks themselves.
Order: whichever drink most obviously plays with colour on the current menu — it's meant to be seen as much as tasted.
No. 17 — Coa
Hong Kong
The team, in the room at Coa. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Named for the tool used to harvest agave, Coa is a full sanctuary for mezcal and tequila lovers, and in 2023 became the first bar in the ranking's history to win the No.1 spot three separate times. Founder Jay Khan, a genuine agave obsessive, took home the Roku Industry Icon Award this year — recognition of a career spent making Hong Kong an unlikely global capital for Mexican spirits.
The detail: Coa is the only bar in Asia's 50 Best Bars history to have held the No.1 ranking three separate times.
Order: ask Khan's team for a guided flight across mezcal styles — the entire bar is built around education as much as drinking.
No. 18 — Virtù
Tokyo
The room at Virtù. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Rumour has it service at this Otemachi hotel bar is so attuned that staff will sometimes bring what you want before you've asked for it — the kind of claim that's usually exaggeration, except regulars insist it isn't. Billed as a cocktail bar and cognac lounge, Virtù's menu leans into lesser-known Japanese spirits — sake, shochu, retro liqueurs — with a printed map showing exactly where each one comes from.
The detail: the cocktail menu includes an actual printed map tracing the geographic origin of each Japanese spirit used behind the bar.
Order: something built around shochu or a retro Japanese liqueur rather than the more familiar options — that's where the bar's actual expertise sits.
No. 19 — BKK Social Club
Bangkok
The room at BKK Social Club. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Argentinian sensibility meets Bangkok hospitality, with a current menu that reaches even further afield into Mexican spirits and flavours. The signature Since 1942 — a Don Julio-based old fashioned built around agave — is a direct homage to the late, legendary tequilero the brand is named after, paired with a food menu that mixes Mexican and traditional Thai dishes in a way that shouldn't work on paper and does in practice.
The detail: the bar's signature drink is a tribute specifically to Don Julio González, the historical tequila-making figure, built as an agave-based old fashioned.
Order: the Since 1942, alongside whatever's currently on the joint Mexican-Thai food menu.
No. 20 — Vender
Taichung, Taiwan
The vending-machine room at Vender. Photo: The World's 50 Best Bars — Editorial image — courtesy of The World's 50 Best Bars. Named Best Bar in Taiwan 2025, and built around possibly the most literal concept on this entire list: drinks dispensed from an actual vending machine, accessed by putting a coin in at the door. Masterminded by Summer Chen and Darren Lim, bottled cocktails and beers come out alongside capsules marking which drink is which — a genuinely playful idea that somehow doesn't undercut the seriousness of what's inside the capsules.
The detail: entry and drink dispensing both run through literal vending machines — you insert a coin to get in, and bottled cocktails come out of a machine inside.
Order: whatever capsule the vending machine gives you — the format is designed to remove choice from the equation entirely.
Volume 3 of the AVARA Best Of series, alongside the World's 20 Best Hotels and World's 25 Best Restaurants. Under consideration next: The World's 20 Best National Parks, Europe's 20 Best, and further regional cuts in the same spirit — real rankings, credibly sourced, written straight, no house-brand puffery.
Source: Asia's 50 Best Bars 2025, sponsored by Perrier (William Reed / 50 Best, announced 15 July 2025, Wynn Palace, Macau).
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