These bars are the Best-in-Class winners at Tatler Best Hong Kong & Macau 2026

Rising Star: Jack Ng, Argo

Part of the opening team at Argo, Jack Ng has developed quickly into a bartender with a clear point of view. His early recognition in competitions points to technical ability, but what stands out more is how naturally that translates behind the bar. There is confidence in the way he approaches a drink. The flavours handled with intent, structure kept in check and ideas introduced without overcomplicating the result. It is the kind of progression that feels earned, built on repetition, observation and a willingness to refine. What stands out is the direction he is heading. Ng understands the fundamentals, but is already shaping a style of his own within them. There is a sense of someone moving with purpose, developing at a pace that suggests far more lies ahead. He is, unmistakably, one to watch.

Best Innovation: Kinsman

Kinsman approaches innovation with a clear point of view: start with something rooted, and see how far it can travel. At Kinsman, Cantonese spirits are not treated as heritage pieces to be preserved, but as ingredients with range. It’s able to move across references, flavour profiles and formats without losing its identity. That idea is worked through consistently. Collaborations with an Aberdeen boat noodle shop, exchanges with Bangkok izakayas, and a steady flow of guest bartenders from across Asia keep the programme in motion. These are not side projects, but part of how the bar develops its thinking. Led by Gavin Yeung, the latest menu, A Tale of Chinatowns, brings that approach into focus. Drinks trace the paths of Chinese communities across Singapore, Manila, Kolkata, Bangkok and Lima, drawing on shared histories while remaining grounded in flavour. The result is a bar that pushes ideas forward and delivers them in a way that is playful, inventive and consistently engaging.

Best Design and Best New Bar: Mius

At Mius, design is not there to impress so much as to remove distraction. The space is pared back. Mid-century modern in tone, with clean lines, light wood, and soft metallics, allowing light, proportion, and movement to do the work. It is a room built for drinking, not posing. High ceilings, neutral palettes, and an absence of clutter shift the focus where it belongs: on the glass in front of you and the conversation around it.

Behind it, Shelley Tai brings a similarly considered approach. Known for her measured, detail-driven style, she builds drinks that favour clarity over complication. Cocktails are stripped to their essentials, a few ingredients, clearly expressed and balanced with precision. The food follows suit: comforting, unfussy, designed to keep you in your seat rather than send you elsewhere.

What sets Mius apart is its sense of resolution. The design, the drinks, the snacks and the intent, each element considered, each one held in proportion to the next. Nothing feels added on, nothing asks for attention it hasn’t earned. It reads as a bar that has been thought through in full, then pared back to what matters, leaving something that feels settled and sure of itself from the very beginning.

Bar of the Year: Bar Leone

Some bars arrive with ceremony: velvet ropes, studied indifference, the faint sense you are being assessed before you are allowed in. Bar Leone takes a different view. It sits in the middle of Central, doors open, seats taken as they come, and from the outset, it feels lived-in rather than staged.

Behind the bar, Lorenzo Antinori and his team have built something that goes beyond good drinks. Cocktails are exact without being fussy—the Negroni stirred with care, Martinis poured in perfect proportion—while the food holds its own, giving you every reason to stay. One round leads easily to another, then something to eat, and before long, leaving slips from the agenda. But it is the way everything comes together that lingers: the room, the rhythm, the sense of welcome, all moving in quiet alignment.

What you find here is completeness. A bar that understands not just how to make drinks or serve food, but how to make people want to stay. It is busy, but never chaotic; familiar, without losing its edge. You come for a drink and find yourself staying for the place itself—the surest sign of a bar that knows exactly what it’s doing, and why you’ll keep coming back.

Best Service: The St Regis Bar

There’s something about The St Regis Bar that encourages you to slow down almost immediately. The room, all dark wood, leather and low light, does its part, but it’s the way the space is run that settles you. Service is attentive without intrusion, present without ever feeling imposed. The bar carries the DNA of its New York counterpart, but grounds it in its own setting. Under head mixologist Kevin Lai, the Maria do Leste offers a Macau interpretation of the Bloody Mary, layered with spice and depth, while the classics are handled with quiet assurance. Live jazz drifts through the room, softening the edges of the evening. What distinguishes it is not any single detail, but the consistency of the whole. The service, the drinks and the atmosphere, each element working in step, creating a bar that feels good to be in.

Rising Star: Victor Pun, W Macau – Studio City

Joining W Macau – Studio City as part of its opening team in 2023, Victor Pun has established himself with a style that feels both rooted and forward-looking. A Macau native, he draws on familiar Asian ingredients and references, but handles them with a lightness that keeps the results from ever feeling literal. There is a narrative instinct to his work. Drinks are not assembled so much as composed, with an eye on how flavours unfold and what they evoke. What emerges is a bartender with a clear sense of direction. The technique is there, but more importantly, so is the judgment of when to push an idea and when to leave it alone. It gives the work a certain authority, the sense of someone already shaping his own space, and doing so with increasing conviction.

Best Innovation: Long Bar

Concealed behind a porthole door, Long Bar reframes what a cocktail bar can be by building its entire identity around narrative. The space draws from Macau’s maritime past—the spice routes, the caves where early gin was stored, the passage of goods and ideas—and carries that story through every layer of the experience. Innovation here lies in how that history is translated into the glass. Gin becomes the central thread, reworked through vintage-style cocktails infused with spices once traded through Macau, while techniques such as solera ageing, more commonly associated with sherry, are applied to drinks like the Negroni and French 75, adding depth that evolves. But it is the synthesis that stands out. Design, technique and storytelling are not separate ideas, but part of a single, coherent experience. Each drink carries context, not just flavour, turning the act of drinking into something immersive, giving this speakeasy a sense of place that feels considered and original.

Best Design and Best New Bar: Pony & Plume

You don’t so much walk into Pony & Plume as find yourself drawn into the rituals of whisky. The name lays it out plainly: the “pony” for precision in the pour, the “plume” for the aromatic haze that threads through each drink, shaping the experience. 

The room leans into it. Saddlery leather, stitched detailing, timber beams and a double-height ceiling. At its centre, an illuminated whisky pyramid rises from lighter expressions to darker, peat-driven bottles, turning the collection into something architectural. The room shifts as you move through it: intimate corners and long sightlines, it sits somewhere between a gentleman’s club and a cabinet of curiosities. 

Behind the bar, Billy Choi treats whisky as both anchor and playground. Drinks carry smoke, spice, sweetness—sometimes all three—without tipping into excess. What holds it together is how quietly consistent it all is. The idea is there in everything, not pushed, just carried through, so by the end of the evening, it’s less something you notice and more something you feel, and it stays with you.

Bar of the Year: Wing Lei Bar

Set within the gilded surrounds of Wing Lei Bar, this is a hotel bar that refuses to behave like one. The room has all the expected polish: lacquer, symmetry and a certain grandeur, but what unfolds within it feels markedly less prescribed. 

Under Mark Lloyd, the experience has been recalibrated. Service sheds the usual script in favour of something more conversational, more attuned. A drink might begin as a suggestion, then shift, adjusted, refined—until it lands where it should. It is a small thing, perhaps, but repeated across an evening, it changes the tone entirely.  

The cocktails lean into experimentation, but always with a clear sense of balance. Classics are not so much reinvented as rethought, threaded with culinary references and global influences drawn from a steady rhythm of collaborations and guest shifts. The Unity menu reads like a list of exchanges: places visited, ideas shared, conversations carried across bars and continents. 

What distinguishes Wing Lei Bar is this sense of movement. It does not stand still, nor does it rely on reputation. Instead, it keeps evolving and, in doing so, sets a standard others are still catching up to.

NOW READ

Hong Kong’s newest restaurants and bars to visit right now

Pocket List: 5 ways to experience Hong Kong by Tatler Best co-jury head Fontaine Cheng

Learn more about Tatler Best and the Asia-Pacific awards programme