5 Cocktails You Can’t Miss — Featuring Asia’s Wildest Ingredients🍸🔥 London, This June
Catch London bartenders celebrating the rare and remarkable of Asia and making cocktails with things you’ve never tasted before: dried fermented tuna, fresh mangosteen, Okinawan black sugar, Buddha’s Hand grated tableside and sake kasu, the pressed lees from sake production.
Created by The Orientalist Spirits in partnership with the team behind London Cocktail Week.
Taste The Orient takes place in London from 22-28 June 2026, bringing together a curated line-up of 45 exceptional Asian bars and restaurants across the capital. Each participating venue will offer a Signature Serve, a specially-created cocktail, a bespoke short menu, a tasting flight or a food pairing designed exclusively for the festival.
Five cocktail highlights from the festival include:
Martinez, Bar Lotus, and Kingsland Road. £15.
Following the TCM cocktail trend sweeping Asia, Bar Lotus has made a house vermouth, taking traditional Chinese medicinal botanicals from the apothecary to the bar and using it in a reworked Martinez. Herbal, complex and rooted in centuries of Eastern flavour tradition.
Meadow and Woodland flights, Kioku by Endo at The OWO. £30 per flight.
Two three-drink kaiseki-inspired flights built around the Japanese principle of capturing ingredients at their seasonal peak. The Meadow flight includes a serve with a very unusual ingredient – katsuobushi (dried fermented skipjack tuna) with white miso and jasmine, as well as a vodka cocktail with fig leaf, gorseflower and corn. The Woodland flight moves through chanterelle, apricot, pine, Douglas fir, sloe and blackberry.
Omija Tea Collins, Lucy Wong, Fitzrovia. £12.
A gin cocktail built on a house-made honey-sweetened tea using the Omija berry, a Korean botanical with five simultaneous flavours in a single ingredient: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spice. Paired with pork and prawn siu mai.
Citrus Ritual, Opium Chinatown. £15.
A gin sour with yuzu and salted lemon cordial, elevated tableside with freshly grated Buddha’s Hand. This rare Chinese citrus has no juice or pulp and is prized entirely for its fragrant oils, which are intense and floral in a way that has no real equivalent in Western cooking.
Pomelo Negroni, Sam Page, Sexy Fish. £10.
Created by current bartender of the year Sam Page from Sexy Fish, the classic Negroni structure has been changed to make the drink more gin-forward, with pomelo cordial included to make the drink more approachable, and shiso distillate providing a clean & aromatic top note. The whole cocktail is batched and sous vide with toasted sansho peppercorns to harmonise the flavours and give citrussy and peppery complexity.
The new week-long cocktail festival is coming to London from 22nd to 28th June.
Built around rare and remarkable Asian flavours, culture and craft. Taste The Orient is a city-wide event from The Orientalist Spirits and the team behind London Cocktail Week, bringing together 45 of the capital’s best Asian bars. Each venue has created a bespoke Signature Serve, exclusively priced and only available during the festival week.
At Sexy Fish, current Bartender of the Year Sam Page has created two Signature Serves at £10 each.
One uses shiso distilled rather than muddled with sansho peppercorns sous vide; the other is built around wintermelon tea, a prized ingredient in Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisine that rarely appears in Western cocktail bars. London’s bar scene has spent years looking east for inspiration, but all too often pares down the complexity of those flavours to suit Western palates.
Taste The Orient invites festival-goers to experience the continent’s exceptional ingredients, distinctive flavours and emerging cocktail trends – from dried fermented tuna and fresh mangosteen to Buddha’s Hand grated tableside and sake kasu, the pressed lees from sake production. This is only a small selection of what’s on offer. Alongside cult favourites and celebrated destinations like GONG Bar at Shangri-La The Shard, Hakkasan Mayfair and Nobu, the festival includes a number of the capital’s hidden gems including Opium, hidden behind an unmarked Chinatown door, The Listening Room at Moi in Soho, Bar Lotus on Kingsland Road, As Above So Below beneath a Stoke Newington barbershop (open just three nights a week) and 19FiftySeven, London’s first Malaysian speakeasy. A full line-up of participating venues and festival experiences, and registration for the free Festival Guide is now open at tastetheorient.com.
Every once in a while, I think it’s good to get out into London and treat yourself! London Cocktail Week is one of our firm favourites. A great excuse to drink cocktails in the city! Attendance is free, although you may need to sign up. It’s best to check out the venues and agree with your friends which ones you like best. Or, just have one at each venue!
Event Details Dates:
Dates: 26 to 28 June 2026
Venues: 45 Asian bars and restaurants across London (full list at tastetheorient.com)
Entry: Free, though pre-registration for some experiences can be made directly with the venues
Festival Guides available to collect at participating venues
Cocktail ingredients:
- Buddha’s Hand. A rare Chinese citrus with no juice or pulp, valued entirely for its extraordinarily fragrant oils. Grated tableside at Opium Chinatown.
- Omija berry. A Korean botanical with five simultaneous flavours in a single ingredient: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and spice. One of the most unusual botanicals available. At Lucy Wong and Archive & Myth.
- Awamori. An Okinawan spirit with a 500-year heritage, distilled from long-grain indica rice. Rarely seen in London cocktails. At all four ROKA locations.
- Shio koji. Japanese fermented rice salt. At The Aubrey.
- Sake kasu. The pressed lees left over from sake production. Rarely used in cocktails. At Sticks n Sushi.
- Katsuobushi. Dried fermented skipjack tuna, used as a cocktail ingredient at Kioku by Endo at The OWO to create something entirely unexpected.
- Chinese medicine botanicals. Bar Lotus on Kingsland Road has made a house vermouth from traditional Chinese medicine herbs for its festival Martinez. Centuries of Eastern herbal tradition applied to a classic cocktail.
The Orientalist Spirits.
Founded by Michel Lu, The Orientalist Spirits is an all-Asian spirits house built around ingredients, aromatics and distilling influences sourced across the continent, created for top-tier hospitality and modern cocktail culture.
The Orientalist Spirits began with a simple gap that Michel Lu believed the industry had overlooked. While Asian cuisines and cocktail cultures were accelerating globally, there was no comparable house of ultra-premium Asian spirits built with the world’s best bartenders in mind. So Michel began a spirit journey, starting at Shangri-La and travelling across Asia to source inspiration and ingredients.
That ambition became The Orientalist Spirits: each expression is a love letter to the continent and a careful curation grounded in Asian flavour references, from highland grains like Tibetan Barley, to regional botanicals, whether tea, honey from Taiwan or even ginseng from Siberia. These have been shaped into spirits that celebrate all of Asia, and are intended to be enjoyed neat, on ice, or as the foundation for modern cocktails.
Hannah Sharman-Cox and Siobhán Payne / London Cocktail Week
Taste The Orient curators, Hannah Sharman-Cox and Siobhán Payne, founded London Cocktail Week in 2010. The festival, now fully owned by the pair, has grown into the world’s leading cocktail event, welcoming hundreds of thousands of guests and helping establish London as one of the great global cocktail capitals. Hannah and Siobhán also founded HANDS, a creative consultancy specialising in hospitality, drinks and culture, and co-created The Pinnacle Guide, the global recognition system for the world’s best cocktail bars.
