A 34-metre slab of raw mahogany is the first thing you notice at the Long Bar in Shanghai — a counter so long it was once billed as the 'Longest Bar in the Far East'. The bar sits inside the restored former Shanghai Club, which first opened its doors in 1911 as a gathering place for the city's foreign elite, and its Jacobean-style interior of dark timber and leather seating has been carefully brought back to life.
What sets this place apart from other slick Bund watering holes is how seriously it takes its own backstory. The cocktail menu arrives in a bespoke wooden box, with hand-drawn cards that walk you through chapters of the Bund's history as you choose your drink. It's a gimmick, sure, but a charming and well-executed one.
The drinks themselves do the historical heavy lifting. The house signature is a reworked Famous Shanghai Buck, widely considered China's first classic cocktail, now built with pomegranate, jasmine and a tickle of Sichuan pepper. Around it sit era-flavoured creations like the Astoria Cocktail, Second Tango and Green Revolution, each nodding to a different moment in the city's past — from the Art Deco jazz age through to the Shanghai of today.
Add live music to the mix and you get a venue that works equally well as a date-night destination or a solo splurge after a day of sightseeing. Come for the theatre of the thing: settle in at that endless counter, order a Shanghai Buck, and let the room do the time travel. You're drinking in the same footprint where taipans and tycoons held court more than a century ago — a rare bit of colonial-era glamour that survived the decades and came back polished.
For travellers, the appeal is practical too. The Bund is Shanghai's most-visited waterfront strip, packed with neoclassical buildings from the same era, and the Long Bar slots neatly into an evening stroll along the Huangpu River. Visit at dusk for the famous Pudong skyline views across the water, then duck inside for a nightcap with history attached. It's the kind of stop that turns a standard city break into something you'll actually remember.
Story credited to SilverKris.
