India's cocktail culture is having a moment under the global spotlight. The sub-continent's bar scene is growing sharper, more confident and more distinctly its own with every passing year.
Into that momentum steps Bombay Cocktail Week (BCW). Running from the 19th to the 21st of August, it imports five of Asia's most recognised bars, from Guangzhou, Seoul, Kumamoto, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, for a run of guest shifts inside the city's own establishments, encompassed by two invitation-only industry convenings. Rather than bringing the region's talent onto a single festival ground, as cocktail weeks elsewhere tend to do, BCW disperses its visitors across five addresses, embedding them behind counters the city already knows well.
The week is the handiwork of All Things Nice, the wine-and-spirits consultancy Nikhil Agarwal founded in 2010. Long before BCW existed as a formal proposition, colleagues note, he had an almost inveterate habit of flying serious international bar talent into the city for a single, unrepeatable night. Bombay Cocktail Week is that private indulgence formalised, the instinct finally given a calendar slot and room to breathe.
Curating alongside All Things Nice is Dewar's Discoveries, the Scotch house's experiential platform. Agarwal has spoken of wanting Bombay placed on the Asian map of the very best drinking cities, an exchange of ideas as much as a showcase of technique, while Bacardi India's Inderjit Singh Dhingra, General Manager for Brown Spirits, frames the partnership as an extension of Dewar's own preoccupation with discovery: championing the platforms that push Scotch, and the culture of drinking around it, toward more considered forms of consumption.
Hope & Sesame, Guangzhou at Akina, Worli
No visiting bar arrives with a hotter hand. On the 28th of July, at a ceremony inside Macau's Wynn Palace, Hope & Sesame ended Hong Kong's Bar Leone's two-year reign to claim No. 1 on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2026, the first mainland Chinese address ever to top the list, and the culmination of a ten-year run for co-founders Bastien Ciocca and Andrew Ho, whose peers voted him last year's Bartenders' Bartender. The bar hides behind an unassuming Cantonese storefront in Guangzhou's historic Dongshankou district, where sous-vide infusion and in-house distillation are marshalled toward one specific goal: translating the flavour-memory of Cantonese childhood into technically exacting cocktails.
Alice, Seoul at Punchline, Bandra
Getting to Alice is itself a small performance: white rabbit signage, a narrow staircase, a concealed door at the back of a Cheongdam-dong flower shop. Once inside, owner Terry Kim's Wonderland commits fully, a fresh rose pressed into every guest's hand, dim wood-panelled rooms with the hush of a private study, a menu built by head bartenders Mason Park and Leo Kim around narrative as much as novelty. A mainstay of Asia's 50 Best Bars for the better part of a decade and currently sitting at No. 13 on the 2026 list, Alice has spent years proving that theatre and technical seriousness aren't mutually exclusive.
Yakoboku, Kumamoto at Bare, Worli
Owner-bartender Shinya Koba spent five years behind bars in Singapore before returning to his native Kumamoto to open Yakoboku — "night jasmine," named for a flower that releases its scent only after dark, inside a 150-year-old former ryokan. It is the first bar from Japan's Kyushu region ever to make Asia's 50 Best Bars list, climbing from a 2023 debut at No. 84 to No. 25 by 2025, a trajectory that owes less to ambition than to a hyperlocal philosophy finally finding its audience. Koba, who represented Japan at Diageo World Class in 2021, builds his menu almost entirely from Kumamoto's own pantry.
Reka, Kuala Lumpur at Bar Find, Fort
Reka, Malay for "creation," with more than a wink toward "Eureka", styles itself, without irony, a postmodern flavour lab. Co-owner and head bartender Joel Poon, alongside a team drawn from Mr Fogg's London, the Experimental Cocktail Club and Singapore's Native, has made four elemental pillars — salt, fat, acid, heat, the bar's entire raison d'être, executed with clarification and distillation apparatus more familiar to a chemistry bench than a bar. Since debuting on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2024, the Bukit Damansara address has climbed to No. 47 on sheer conceptual audacity. Its host for the week has restless credentials of its own: Bar Find, ostensibly a Kolkata bar, currently makes its home inside Fort's Kitaab Mahal, a fittingly peripatetic pairing. It is also India's first travelling bar.
28 HongKong Street, Singapore at Soho House, Juhu
If this whole circuit has an origin point, it's here. When Asia's 50 Best Bars launched in 2016, an unmarked speakeasy behind a 1960s Singapore shophouse — no signage, no ceremony, a blacked-out curtain standing in for a proper door, claimed the inaugural No. 1 spot: a sui generis proposition that effectively invented the modern Asian craft-cocktail bar as a category. Opened on Halloween night in 2011 and helmed today by Michael Callahan alongside Zdenek Kastanek and David Cordoba, 28 HongKong Street imported the unfussy, ice-obsessed classicism of New York's early-2000s cocktail renaissance and gave it a Singaporean address, favouring hand-cut ice and small-batch spirits over spectacle.
The week closes on the 21st with The Bombay Measure, a panel discussion tracing cocktail culture's evolution across Asia, featuring the visiting bartenders alongside the city's own industry leaders, with Bombay written firmly into that story.
At a Glance
- What: Bombay Cocktail Week, presented by All Things Nice in association with Dewar's Discoveries
- Takeovers: 20–21 August, across five Mumbai venues
- Bookend events: Fielia, Royal Western India Turf Club (invite-only)
- More: allthingsnice.in · @allthingsniceind
