The drink critics have spoken. On June 21, the second annual Asia’s 50 Best Bars list was released, featuring bars from 14 cities across ten countries. As with last year’s list, KL’s sole representative is Omakase + Appreciate, the bar that kicked off the city’s ‘speakeasy’ trend when it first opened in 2013. Founded by Karl Too and Shawn Chong, the bar claimed the 41st place in the list – which could be seen as a bittersweet result, considering that it came in tenth last year.
Shawn, however, remains upbeat and proud of what has been achieved. ‘Oh, we’re not disappointed at all with our place on the list – the fact that we’re still on it says something,’ he said, adding that the lack of movement among regional bartenders to KL was one of the contributing factors to why our city is underrepresented in the list. ‘I think KL’s bars, including ours, weren’t hosting as many guest shifts as we did the previous year, and we also don’t have a big bar show or a big cocktail event to, say, Singapore’s Cocktail Week,’ he said.
He sees the progressive Bangkok bar scene – which had five entries in this year’s list, with The Bamboo Bar as Thailand’s best at 13th place – as something the local scene can learn from. ‘Bangkok’s bar scene has risen very quickly over the past two years; even if it’s not fully fledged yet, you can see the progress happening every two months,’ he said. ‘It helps that many of the bars in the list are owned by bartenders who have a vision of how to run the bar and make decisions that are focused on developing better cocktail programmes. Bangkok’s Backstage Cocktail Bar [which made its debut in 18th place] is a great example of a bar where all the shareholders are bartenders,’ he said.
As for the future of Omakase + Appreciate, Shawn sees the bar progressing according to plan, regardless of their position on the list. ‘We’ve already hit the milestone of achieving tenth last year – to us, that’s just a number; we’re going to continue innovating our products, and engage with more international and regional activities. Our cocktails change every six to eight weeks, incorporating local and obscure ingredients – we might not go as far out as what Native in Singapore are doing but we are focused on getting our fundamentals perfect,’ he added.
As for the top of the list, Singapore’s Manhattan moved up four places to claim the title from 28 HongKong Street (also from Singapore), while Shanghai’s Speak Low and Tokyo’s High Five maintained their second and third place spots respectively.
For the full list, visit www.worlds50bestbars.com/asia