Four floors up an anonymous Wan Chai building, behind a door you would walk straight past, there is a Japanese garden and five hundred whiskies.
The best rooms in this city are rarely the ones you can see from the street. Mizunara sits on the fourth floor of a commercial building on Lockhart Road — directly across from The Hari — and there is nothing at pavement level to suggest it exists. That, I suspect, is entirely the point.
361–363 Lockhart Road, Wan Chai
The Fourth Floor
You take a lift in a building that offers you no encouragement whatsoever, and the doors open onto dark wood, low light and leather. It is a Ginza bar that has been quietly airlifted into Wan Chai.
And then — improbably, four floors above one of the loudest streets in Hong Kong — a terrace with a Japanese garden.
Ask for a seat by the garden. A view of trees, above Lockhart Road, is not something this city hands out often.
The Library
Five Hundred Bottles
The name is a joke at the bar's own expense. Mizunara oak is notoriously difficult to make barrels from — porous, awkward, inclined to leak. The results are worth the trouble. So is the room.
The collection runs past five hundred bottles, from Japan, Scotland, Taiwan and India, and arrives in a leather-bound menu that takes a while to read. The cocktails, under Massimo Petovello, are built on Japanese technique and hand-cut ice. Mine came with a wedge of pear and no explanation, which I respected enormously.
Six until two, Monday to Saturday. Closed Sunday. Smart casual — and they mean it.
“It is a Ginza bar, quietly airlifted into Wan Chai.
Go late, go quietly, and take someone whose company survives a long menu.
Some addresses are better kept than shared. I'm sharing this one anyway.
— Reyna Harilela