Cocktails of Asia, by Holly Graham

Cocktails of Asia: Regional Recipes and the Spirited Stories Behind Them is a great primer for those who want to find out the origin stories behind many notable cocktail bars in Asia, as well as the people behind those bars.

With its geographically diverse coverage – featuring bars everywhere from Goa and Nha Trang to Seoul and Singapore – the book is also a default guide to the wider Asian cocktail scene. Where Cocktails of Asia adds value to the scene is in its capturing of a unique moment in our regional cocktail history (2022), just when many of the most famous institutions and innovative people in the Asian industry were just emerging from Covid-19. 

With her drinks journalism background, Graham gives us an easily approachable, contemporary history of the local scene across Bangkok, Delhi, KL, Singapore, Tokyo, and much of Asia. She profiles more than 50 bars across the region, many of which she has frequented personally from their founding through their development up to 2022. The short features are a great know-before-you-go primer to better understand the people behind the bar, and their signature cocktails.

Some notable bars include 28 Hong Kong Street (Singapore), Quinary (Hong Kong), The Cocktail Club (Jakarta), Vender (Taiwan), and many more.

She fills a gap in Asia’s cocktail history which we all lived through, but few other sources have actually documented. Poignantly, the book also features contemporary accounts of several notable institutions which have since closed, including Analog, Maka Hiki, and Tippling Club.

The book is written non-sequentially, meaning you can pick up and read any of its features in any order. True to its title, the book is organised by cocktails (alphabetically), and not by geography or bar, so it’s not exactly a handy city bar-hopping guide for those looking for one. However, you’ll find recipes for signature cocktails like Indo Mai Tai (from Potato Head in Bali), Not Your Midori (from Bar Sanyou in Shenzhen), Pomelo (from Mahaniyom in Bangkok), and more.

In addition to profiling signature drink recipes from each of the bars, Graham also provides brief primers on some notable Asian spirits like baijiu, makeoli and Batavia Arrack, along with origin stories about some of Asia’s iconic cocktails like the Bamboo (Japan), Jungle Bird (Malaysia), Pegu Club (Myanmar), and the Singapore Sling. It’s also interspersed with a mix of random but interesting facts, like how Hong Kong' DarkSide sources ingredients from a local farm on rural Lantau island, or the origins of Manila OG David Ong’s famous ABC shots.

With its gorgeous photography, Cocktails of Asia is the kind of coffee table book you can breeze through from cover to cover, and it reads like Graham’s own love letter to the Asian bar industry.