Somewhere inside a 40-minute conversation that moved from Indian tourism and Hong Kong traffic signals to bartender confidence and the emotional character of a guest shift, Nikhil Agarwal admitted that Hong Kong might be his favourite city in the world. “There is an energy there,” said the founder of All Things Nice and Bombay Cocktail Week. He loves its combination of modernism and tradition, the density of its hospitality and even the sounds at its pedestrian crossings. Later, he described Tokyo as being “another level altogether” and called Bangkok “a very, very strong contender” among Asian cocktail cities. “Bangkok is going to surprise everybody,” he said. “It’s brilliant.”
Bombay Cocktail Week was partly created inside this admiration, though not in service of it. Held from 19 to 21 August, the inaugural edition brought Hope & Sesame from Guangzhou, Alice from Seoul, Yakoboku from Japan, Reka from Kuala Lumpur and Singapore’s 28 HongKong Street into Mumbai for guest shifts, an industry gathering and a panel discussion. Agarwal wanted consumers to experience bars they might otherwise know only through lists and social media; he also wanted the visiting bartenders to meet the people behind Mumbai’s bars. “We know you’re great, but we also have great talent here,” he said, describing the intent behind taking the visitors through local restaurants and bars. The proposition was not that Asia had arrived to civilise Bombay’s cocktail culture. The visitors were also expected to pay attention.
The Numbers Problem
The event’s premise contained an unusually frank assessment of Mumbai’s position. While India’s cocktail culture has advanced quickly, the press announcement conceded that Bombay had yet to be considered alongside Asia’s established bar cities. Agarwal went further during our conversation. “Bombay has actually lagged behind cities like Delhi and Bangalore in global recognition for cocktails or bar scenes,” he said. The city might feel saturated with openings—particularly if your working week involves invitations to them—but he argues that the real number remains deceptively small. “We always think there are so many bars opening up,” he said. “They’re not that many. If you literally spend time, go to every region—go to Colaba, go to Fort—you can count them. It’s not that many.”
Hong Kong supplied his immediate counterexample: a drinker can pass an extraordinary number of bars on a single road. Mumbai’s establishments are more dispersed, while the total ecosystem remains shallow beside cities that have spent decades accumulating neighbourhood bars, hotel bars, independent operators, international talent, educated regulars and bartenders who eventually leave good jobs to open rooms of their own. India is changing at such speed that Agarwal expects the beverage industry of the early 2030s to look unrecognisable from the one operating today. Yet, he said, Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru “still haven’t gone to even a fraction of what they already have” in more developed Asian markets. A city can be booming without being mature.
The gap becomes particularly unforgiving for bartenders. They are judged online beside people working in Hong Kong, Seoul or Singapore, although many come from backgrounds that do not permit regular international travel. Agarwal feels strongly about the contradiction: the industry expects them to reproduce a global standard they may never have experienced as customers. “If you don’t experience world-class, how can you be world-class?” he asked. A recipe can be copied and a technique learned from video; neither communicates how a bartender controls a room, recovers an unhappy table or makes a guest feel recognised within seconds. Bombay Cocktail Week’s more useful work therefore happened around the drinks—in conversations, meals, introductions and the opportunity to watch another hospitality culture at close range.
What Guangzhou Learned
Hope & Sesame’s Bastien Ciocca understands the long distance between opening an ambitious bar and building a drinking culture around it. The Guangzhou establishment recently completed a decade in business. “In the early days, not many people would have thought to come to visit,” he said. “Now we have people making arrangements to visit us from really far away. That’s proof that perseverance and showcasing unique ideas and flavours works.”
Hope & Sesame’s idea of Chinese flavour changed alongside the confidence of its team. “Our early cocktail menus were great, but they became more complex, sharing deeper local flavours and approaches, and at the same time more approachable to many consumers,” Ciocca said. The technique grew more ambitious, but it was not permitted to take over the guest’s experience. “We don’t share too many details about these and focus on the drink flavours and ideas,” he explained. “If you want to know more, we can go deeper into explanation.” The bar became more Chinese and easier to enjoy at the same time. Local identity did not require drinks that arrived with a dissertation.
Guangzhou also possessed advantages that predated its most celebrated cocktail bars. “It’s a city full of foodies,” Ciocca said. “Locals love to eat and drink like no one else.” Cantonese people travel widely, he added, often with family connections in cities such as London or Melbourne, and return having visited bars overseas. “That helped a lot in shaping Hope & Sesame into what we are today.” The city already understood appetite, hospitality and the pleasure of discussing what was on the table. Its cocktail bars found a new language for an existing culture.
His response to Mumbai was correspondingly patient. The city already feels as though it is growing well, he said, and events connecting it to other parts of Asia are “a great start”. But Hope & Sesame’s own history does not support the fantasy of a quick transformation through rankings, imported equipment or one celebrated menu. It supports ten years of work. Even during a guest shift, Ciocca resists behaving as though the visiting bar’s identity is sacred. “It should be a balance of both showcasing what we do—how we create our most iconic drinks—but also adjusting or choosing the right cocktails for both the city and the venue,” he said. “We are working in the hospitality industry. It’s about being great hosts and anticipating guests’ needs.”
Seoul, With A Mushroom Hat
Alice’s Loni Kim rejects another false distinction: that a serious cocktail must be solemn. “I don’t see a well-crafted, serious cocktail and theatrical storytelling as opposites,” she said. “I believe they can absolutely coexist.” Alice begins with playful ideas, then subjects them to open discussion. Team members are encouraged to speak freely and critically regardless of position; they continue exchanging ideas “until we feel there’s nothing left unsaid”.
When a drink begins feeling overly important, the team looks for humour. Foggy Fongo, an Old Fashioned-style cocktail that imagines a forest at night, is served with a small mushroom hat placed on the guest. “It’s a simple detail,” Kim said, “but it brings a playful moment into an otherwise serious cocktail.” Her Bombay Cocktail Week menu moved deliberately between styles: Liquid Apple reconstructed the familiar flavours and aromas of an apple; Quack Quack imagined what the river inhabited by ducks might taste like; Okie Dok explored Korea’s culture of jang, or fermented condiments; and Foggy Fongo supplied the nocturnal forest. “Whatever your personal taste may be,” she said, “there’s hopefully at least one drink you can fall in love with.”
Kim attributes Seoul’s rise less to a single technique than to the temperament of its bartenders. “We’re constantly studying, exchanging ideas and enjoying healthy competition with one another,” she said. “In Korea, I feel there’s a particularly strong desire to keep getting better and to push ourselves further. That energy naturally pushes the whole scene forward.” Mumbai’s history and culture, she believes, are among its greatest assets. “If those stories can be interpreted and expressed in compelling ways through cocktails and bar experiences, I believe they can give people even more reasons to love Mumbai and feel connected to the city.”
Her most useful encounter with Indian flavour was also the least grand. Kim tried paan and found its post-meal function as interesting as its taste. “It wasn’t really about one particular ingredient,” she said. “It was about many different ingredients coming together to create a specific flavour, purpose and cultural experience.” That combination did not exist in Korea and was therefore memorable. Then came the more decisive judgement: “And most importantly, it was delicious.”
When A Takeover Becomes A Tick Mark
Bombay hardly lacks bar takeovers. A celebrated bartender arrives, makes a short menu beneath several logos, poses for photographs and moves on. Agarwal acknowledged that “some of them can be quite generic”, but defended the format when the host cares about what surrounds the shift. He recalled an event in Goa where the host did not simply bring down a bartender from Hong Kong; it built a food experience around the visit, serving Hong Kong-inspired dishes absent from its regular menu. “It didn’t stop there,” he said. When approached properly, a takeover becomes “community building”, an introduction to new flavours and an opportunity for the visitor to form an impression of India that survives the flight home.
He has also watched visiting bartenders treated as little more than labour—brought in, placed behind the counter and given no meaningful contact with the city. Others are received “like their brothers and sisters”, taken out for meals and shown markets, restaurants and neighbourhoods. During Bombay Cocktail Week, one local host independently asked whether she could take the visitors to a spice market. “It’s not even part of Bombay Cocktail Week,” Agarwal said. That spontaneous curiosity was closer to his idea of cultural exchange than any branded schedule.
“When it’s done correctly, it’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “Takeovers can also be magical. It depends on the host.” Without that interest, they become “just a tick mark” in a marketing box. The same venue might host a takeover every week and still make each one valuable; another can stage fewer and produce nothing beyond drinks and evidence that the drinks occurred. The problem is not frequency. It is the absence of love.
Agarwal eventually located the necessary change inside the relationship between Indian hospitality workers and their guests. In his view, the country’s service culture still carries a hierarchy in which restaurant employees are treated differently and begin to accept the unequal position assigned to them. The result is technical competence without the freedom to engage: a bartender knows the drink but hesitates to joke, recommend, disagree or offer the guest something they did not know to request.
“We don’t communicate freely,” he said. His best bar experiences involve somebody confident and engaging, capable of paying attention to who he is and responding without the stiffness of a subordinate. That relationship requires the bartender to believe, as Agarwal put it, “I am not less than my customer.” A guest may have different needs or greater spending power; neither makes them better than the person serving them. Until that confidence operates across more rooms, Mumbai can improve its recipes without entirely improving its hospitality.
Near the end of Bombay Cocktail Week, one of the visitors posted a photograph from outside CSMT, where the word “BOMBAY” appeared in yellow across the image. Agarwal was pleased by the size and geographic spread of the bartender’s audience: hospitality professionals, restaurateurs and drinkers in several cities would see it. They would see Bombay outside the scheduled guest shift, carried into the visitor’s own account of the week. “To me,” he said, “that is goal achieved.”
