Hope & Sesame named Asia's Best Bar, a first for China

Hope & Sesame topped Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026, the first mainland Chinese bar to take the number-one spot, ending Hong Kong's Bar Leone two-year run at the ceremony in Macau.

The Guangzhou bar sits behind a plain Cantonese storefront in the Dongshankou district. Co-founders Andrew Ho and Bastien Ciocca met at hotel school in Switzerland before opening the venue with their partners Amethy Huang and Marcia Xiao; the bar has held a place on the list for seven years running.

Its menu leans on Cantonese cooking and the wider Chinese diaspora, reworking familiar flavours through cocktail technique rather than importing a Western bar template and adding local garnishes on top. The team has grown from four people to more than 100, and opened a Shenzhen branch in 2022, a scale unusual for a bar built around a single, tightly held cocktail list rather than a chain format.

Cantonese flavours reworked through cocktail technique, not a Western template with local garnishes.

A record year for mainland China

China placed seven bars on this year's list, its highest tally yet, a shift the ceremony's organisers linked to a decade of bartenders training locally, building their own supply chains and drinks menus, rather than moving to Hong Kong or Singapore first. Hope & Sesame's win caps that run rather than starting it.

Bar Leone's two-year hold on the top spot, by contrast, showed how quickly rankings can move once a scene matures: Hong Kong still placed strongly this year across several categories, just not at number one.

Where Asia's list sits against the rest

The result lands ahead of World's 50 Best Bars heading to Milan in October, the global ranking that regional lists like this one feed into, and comes during a busier-than-usual year for bar awards, following Rome's own bar show earlier this year. Whether Hope & Sesame can hold the top spot next year, against a deeper field of mainland contenders, is the first question Guangzhou's bar scene will face when the 2027 ranking comes around.