As Wynn marked 20 years in Macau and hosted Asia’s 50 Best Bars for the second consecutive year, Wynn Palace became a meeting point for bartenders, chefs and ideas from around the world. Jyoti Kumari takes us on a journey.
Typhoon Noul and I arrived at roughly the same time, which is the sort of coincidence that usually ruins a week like this one. But it did not. Macau sat far enough west of the Guangdong landfall to mostly watch the thing go by, and so did I, from a 19th-floor suite over the water, where for two days the sky ran the one show at Wynn nobody had choreographed and nobody could switch off. Inside the building, it registered as a rumour. I only knew otherwise because I spent that first stretch refreshing arrival times for friends whose flights kept slipping.
The front of house was as cool as the highball ice. Flights were cancelled, ferries stopped and the bridge from Hong Kong closed, which is how much of this industry gets here, and shifts were rebuilt around bartenders who never made it. If you had not been told, you would not have guessed. There is a particular grace, and a particular kind of community, in the way someone covers for a colleague stuck on the wrong side of a closed bridge, and I watched a lot of it.
That sense of community would become the story of the week.
Asia’s 50 Best Bars had returned to Wynn for a second consecutive year, bringing with it bartenders and chefs from across the world for six days of guest shifts, dinners, collaborations and, eventually, the awards themselves. The timing carried another significance: 2026 marks twenty years since the original Wynn Macau opened.
The overlap was useful shorthand for how much had changed. When Wynn Macau opened in 2006, Cotai was still largely reclaimed ground and nobody was flying in for a cocktail. Two decades later, some of the most influential people in the global bar industry were crossing borders, and, once the weather allowed, bridges to spend a week together at Wynn Palace.
“Twenty years is an incredible milestone, and hosting Asia’s 50 Best Bars alongside it shows just how far we have come, as well as the fact that our momentum is not slowing down,” says Mark Lloyd, Director of Bars at Wynn Macau and Wynn Palace. For him, the pairing makes a larger point: Macau is becoming a serious destination for food and drink.
Macau Beyond the Tables
The picture most people carry around involves green felt, a great deal of money and very little natural light. It isn’t an unfair one. It is simply incomplete.
Macau’s food story predates every casino in it. Macanese cooking, with its Portuguese base, Cantonese technique and detours through Goa, Malacca and Mozambique, has a decent claim to being one of the world’s original fusion cuisines. Macau is also a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, though many visitors still arrive knowing far more about its gaming tables than its kitchens.
“While entertainment is a massive part of Macau’s identity and history, people often overlook its rich culinary heritage,” Lloyd says. What he sees changing is the reason people come. Increasingly, visitors are travelling to the city specifically for food and mixology experiences.
Wynn’s own evolution makes the point. Twenty years after the original resort opened, Wynn Macau and Wynn Palace carry twenty-three restaurants and bars between them, and Wynn Palace holds more Forbes Five-Star restaurants than any other resort in the world. You can eat Portuguese egg tarts at the Gourmet Pavilion at eleven in the morning and sit down that evening at Chef Tam’s Seasons, No.7 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2026, in front of a menu that changes almost every two weeks. But for this particular week, though, the more interesting transformation was happening outside the dining rooms.
Meet Me at the Flowers
A good part of Asia’s 50 Best Bars week happened in the corridor that runs in a long circle between Wynn Palace’s north and south blocks.
The floral installations stop people where they stand, and there was a crowd around them at most hours, phones up, waiting their turn. By day three they had picked up a second job: people stopped saying meet me at the bar and started saying meet me at the flowers.
At any hour you were running into some of the biggest names in bars and mixology, not on a stage or a panel but standing around with a coffee, comparing notes. I lost count of the conversations I walked past that were clearly the start of something: two people from two cities working out whether an idea travelled.
That, Lloyd says, is really the point of bringing everyone together. “For me, the true heart of hosting Asia’s 50 Best has always been about creating a space where the bars and people I love can connect with one another.”
The hope is that what starts in a Wynn Palace corridor does not stay there: collaborations become reciprocal visits, and people who met in Macau eventually turn up behind each other’s bars thousands of kilometres away. For a week ostensibly organised around an awards ceremony, surprisingly little of what mattered seemed to be happening on a stage.
What Happens When Everyone Is in the Same Building
More than twenty events ran from 24 to 29 July, with over fifty bartenders and chefs arriving from Asia, Europe and North America under an expanded edition of Wing Lei Bar & Friends. Somebody had clearly thought hard about who should stand next to whom.
The Road Less Traveled was perhaps the clearest example. Three bars in one room: Nomad Lab from Ulaanbaatar, Barc from Kathmandu and Kiki Lounge from Douglas on the Isle of Man. Three cities with nothing obvious in common, and that was the whole idea.
“Each brought a completely different philosophy of hospitality to the table for one unforgettable night,” Lloyd says. “That is a bar crawl you will not find anywhere else on Earth.”
His approach to the programming is considerably less complicated than the logistics required to pull it off. Having worked across countries and collected friendships along the way, Lloyd says his guiding question when putting together the shifts is simply: “What would my guests love?” The answers got increasingly unruly as the week went on.
On Monday night, Danil Nevsky and Lorenzo Querci were behind Wing Lei Bar at ten o’clock, billed as Cocktail Man vs Superman and played exactly as flamboyantly as that promises. Querci knows precisely how good he is and was hand-feeding the crowd by the end. This is not a profession that turns in early, and the late hours were where much of the craft came out.
Running under all of it was the second chapter of Wing Lei Bar’s signature menu, twelve cocktails built from anecdotes Lloyd collected over a year on the road with the bar.
And the kitchens were very much in on the exchange.
Tam Kwok Fung cooked four hands with Yoshihiro Narisawa, Cantonese seasonality meeting Narisawa’s Satoyama cooking, with the pairing coming from Narisawa’s own bar. At Michelin-starred Mizumi, Shanghai’s VICE Bistro-Lounge and Pony Up served off-menu snacks at the sushi counter. Sri Lanka’s Smoke & Bitters took over SW Steakhouse across both the bar and dining room. After the ceremony, an eight-hand supper brought Varun Totlani of Mumbai’s Masque together with three of Wynn’s own executive chefs.
The point was less that these names had all arrived in Macau than what became possible once they were in the same building. They were cooking for each other, drinking with each other and watching how everyone else worked. That is the part you cannot book.
What the Room Sounded Like
By the 28th, the sky had cleared and the Grand Theater started its countdown.
Hope & Sesame took it home. The Guangzhou bar that Bastien Ciocca and Andrew Ho have spent the better part of a decade building was named The Best Bar in Asia 2026, the first mainland Chinese bar ever to do it, ending Bar Leone’s two-year hold.
For India, there was plenty to celebrate too. Soka climbed from No.28 to No.18 and Bar Spirit Forward from No.37 to No.30, while Goa’s Boilermaker made one of the evening’s biggest leaps, rising from No.30 to No.8 and taking Best Bar in India. A dive bar in Siolim was suddenly sitting in the same top ten as some of Asia’s most celebrated cocktail rooms, all susegad and no lavish interiors, built by co-owner Pankaj Balachandran on the idea that a good drink does not need a performance around it. The night before, they had been pouring at the Bartenders’ Feast in a Wynn food hall.
That was the strange pleasure of watching the rankings unfold. So many of the names being called out on stage had spent the previous few days simply being around. Andrew Ho had worked a shift at Wing Lei Bar on Sunday, two nights before his own bar took the title. Bar Sathorn opened the week behind that same bar and then climbed thirty-one places for Highest Climber. Dry Wave came in at No.4 and was pouring again at the closing brunch two days later.
The thing I will remember is the sound of the room: a thousand people, most of them in direct competition with each other, cheering louder for someone else’s result than for their own. It did not read as etiquette. It read as five days of shared shifts, shared corridors and shared exhaustion arriving all at once in one place.
Lloyd hopes those relationships are the thing that lasts. Ulaanbaatar turning up in Kathmandu. Leeds ending up in Bangalore. The connections outliving the week that made them.
Five days earlier, I had watched bartenders cover shifts for people stranded on the wrong side of a typhoon. By the end of the week, the bridge was open again. But for me the more interesting question was where everyone would go next.
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