no prescription required
penicillin, hong kong
Some bars use narrative as decoration. Others build their entire logic around it.
Penicillin is not a metaphor chosen lightly. It points directly to Alexander Fleming’s discovery, and the room makes no attempt to soften the reference. White tiles and clinical surfaces make a space that feels closer to a working laboratory than a lounge. Behind the bar, equipment hums and gleams. Not as theatre, but as tools. They want you to understand how things are made.
Penicillin was conceived as Hong Kong’s first closed-loop cocktail bar, and that principle runs quietly through everything it does. Ingredients are local where possible. Waste is reconsidered rather than ignored. Fermentation plays a central role, not as a trend, but as a method. Much of it happens in the bar’s climate-controlled fermentation enclosure, known simply as the Stinky Room. The name is affectionate, practical, and entirely accurate.
The approach is driven by its founders, Laura and Agung Prabowo, whose background in sustainability and hospitality informs the bar’s systems as much as its flavours. Partnerships with initiatives such as EcoSpirits and Green Step Group extend that thinking outward, including a project that links certain cocktails to tree planting in the Kalimantan rainforest. The gesture is there, but it is not pushed. Like most things at Penicillin, it exists as part of a wider structure rather than a headline.
Drinks here tend to resist easy categorisation. They borrow techniques from the kitchen as readily as from the bar. Ferments, brines, and infusions sit alongside classic spirits. One of the house cocktails, a creamy and tangy combination of strawberry brine, coconut kefir, and white chocolate-infused whisky, reads more like a thought experiment than a crowd-pleaser. It works because it is grounded in process, not novelty.
The drink closest to a Negroni in structure is called Our Final Warning. It does not pretend to be the classic. Instead, it acknowledges the framework and then moves deliberately within it. Rotovap-distilled watermelon gin replaces the expected backbone. Omija vermouth brings a different kind of acidity. Campari remains present, but is softened and reshaped through jalapeño sous-vide. Sea samphire adds a saline note that shifts the drink closer to savoury than sweet.
The bitterness is still there. The balance still matters. But the expression is unmistakably Penicillin.
What is interesting about bars like this is not whether they improve on tradition, but how they test its flexibility. Penicillin does not reject the canon. It interrogates it. It asks how far structure can stretch before it breaks, and what new language might emerge in the process.
The room reflects that same curiosity. It is not comfortable in the traditional sense. It is precise. Focused. A place that invites attention rather than relaxation. You do not come here to switch off. You come to engage.
Penicillin is not interested in being liked by everyone. It does not soften its edges. It assumes its guests are willing to meet it halfway, to think a little, taste a little more carefully, and accept that some drinks are meant to provoke rather than reassure.
In a city that moves quickly and reinvents itself constantly, that kind of clarity feels refreshing. A bar that knows exactly what it is doing, and why.
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