Sip & Savor
The Low Road: The Star Ferry Subpoena
Hong Kong · 5 stops · every stop verified in live map data · ends near a bed
Hong Kong publishes every liquor licence as a raw file regenerated daily, so all five of these rooms were proved licensed against yesterday's register. The subpoena crosses the harbour in the middle, which remains the finest two dollar journey on earth.
The Captain's Bar is closed for the Mandarin's summer recess and reopens on 1 October 2026. The rest of the road trades as normal. If you walk it before then, start at Tai Lung Fung and raise the silver tankard another month.
🥃 Walk it live on the map
- 1 · The Cold Open
Captain's Bar, Mandarin OrientalThe Mandarin opened on Connaught Road in the autumn of 1963 and the Captain's Bar poured its first pint the same season, a low lit wood and brass room just off the lobby. It became the closing room of Central, where bankers and newspapermen settled the day's business over draught beer served in chilled silver tankards, and regulars keep their own engraved tankards behind the bar like safe deposit boxes, some handed down a generation. Order the cold draught in silver and open the subpoena over it, properly chilled. The room went dark for the hotel's full rebuild in 2005 and came back unchanged in spirit, which is the point of it. It is dark again now for the hotel's summer recess and reopens on 1 October 2026. Sixty years of gossip has soaked into the panelling and no renovation has managed to remove it. - 2 · The Detour
Tai Lung FungA corner bar at the foot of Ming Kam Building on Hing Wan Street, directly behind the Blue House, the Grade 1 tenement on the Antiquities Advisory Board's books since 2009. The room wears the 1960s like a stage costume: neon over the door, shrine red walls, drink menus printed up like old newspapers. The name honours the great Cantonese opera troupe of that decade, whose leads packed houses while Suzie Wong was making Wan Chai notorious a few streets north. It was already pouring by 2012, before this end of the district gave you many reasons to linger after dark, and nobody has written down the actual opening year. Order the plum wine cocktail under the neon, or a lemongrass martini if you want the house showing off. The licence over the door reads 大龍鳳, and the room lives up to the billing. - 3 · The Anchor
Yung KeeKam Shui Fai started with a roast goose stall in 1938, opened Yung Kee proper in 1942, was bombed out in the war, and landed on Wellington Street in 1964; the golden tower he rebuilt there in 1978 still carries his name. Order the charcoal roast goose, skin lacquered like a verdict seal, and start with the house made century eggs and pickled ginger if your nerve holds. The verdict is not a figure of speech: the family fought over the company all the way to the Court of Final Appeal, which ordered the holding company wound up in November 2015. The kitchen never missed a service through any of it. The dining room runs from eleven in the morning to half past ten at night, seven days. A goose leg and a glass of something cold is the main course of the summons. - 4 · The Wildcard
Ned Kelly's Last StandTom Parker and two friends opened this Australian outlaw bar on Ashley Road on 16 December 1972, and it has not stopped for breath since; the papers marked its fiftieth birthday with the band still on the stand. Dixieland runs nightly from half past nine, teapot solos included, played by a house band whose leader took the bandstand in 1998 and never gave it back. Take the Star Ferry across first, the finest two dollar cross examination of a skyline anywhere, then follow the trombone up Ashley Road. Order whatever is cold on draught, a meat pie if the band is between sets, and a request the band will take. Doors open at half past eleven in the morning and the room runs until two. The band takes requests, not prisoners.Dixieland nightly from half past nine, teapot solos included · 🎧 they play · China Coast Jazzmen, live at Ned Kelly's, New Year 2023 ↗ - 5 · The Last Call
OzoneThe lift lets you out on the 118th floor of the ICC, where the Ritz-Carlton keeps what it bills as the highest bar on the planet, and the harbour you crossed an hour ago becomes a scale model of itself. The room opened with the hotel in 2011, and its liquor licence names this exact floor, portion A, which is as precise as altitude gets in Hong Kong. Order the signature Ozone cocktail, local spirits sharpened with fruit, one drink above the clouds, and take the terrace side if the weather allows. Long trousers after nine and no flip flops ever; the dress code is enforced nearly half a kilometre above the harbour, because up here it matters. Sunday opens at noon, other days from mid afternoon until one in the morning. Subpoena discharged, bed a lift ride below the bar.
Fly in via HKG. The live map shows every pub, bar and restaurant around the route, compiled from OpenStreetMap and Google with live ratings.