The Old Man, on Aberdeen Street
The Old Man sits on Aberdeen Street, just off Hollywood Road, behind an unmarked door that opens onto a flight of stairs going down. The bar takes its name and entire conceptual frame from Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea, his Cuban years, the daiquiris at Floridita and the mojitos at La Bodeguita, the disciplined economy of the prose - and turns that frame into a forty-seat cocktail room that has been on Asia's 50 Best Bars since the year after it opened. The bar opened in 2017. The menu is divided into sections named for Hemingway novels. The drinks earn their literary frame.
The bar's opening drink, then and now, is the Papa Doble - the daiquiri Hemingway drank at Floridita in Havana, here made with two ounces of rum, no sugar, half a grapefruit, a teaspoon of maraschino, lime. The Floridita served it without the sugar because Hemingway was diabetic; The Old Man serves it the same way as the operating principle of the bar. The drink is the bar's standing argument that minimalism is a craft choice, not an aesthetic.
The Sea section of the menu - five drinks, all built around marine ingredients - is where the bar's technical work is most evident. The Caribbean Sea is a long drink with rum, a salted-cucumber syrup, lime, and a small amount of seaweed-infused sparkling water; the Old Man and the Sea is a stirred drink built around a clarified seafood broth that the bartenders refused to explain on first ask and that turned out to involve dashi. The drinks should not work. They work.
The room itself is small, low-lit, and entirely refuses to be the kind of Hemingway-themed bar you have been in elsewhere. There are no typewriters, no fishing rods, no photographs of the man with marlins. The reference is in the menu's discipline rather than the wall's decoration. Arrive at 8pm, order the Papa Doble, work through one drink from each menu section, leave at 11. The Old Man is not a long-evening bar.
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