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East End Brewery
This place out in Quarry Bay is a beer lover's must-visit. You can choose from more than 30 beers and lagers from around the world, including a couple of local microbrews. There's wifi access too. The Causeway Bay branch serves up much the same beer and fodder if you can't make it this far out.
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Feather Boa
Feather Boa is a plush lounge hidden behind gold drapes. Part camp lounge, part bordello - part those curtains and order a mango daiquiri (around HK$75 ). It was once an antiques shop - thus the odd furnishings.
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Forest Bar & Restaurant
This cosy bar has five beers on tap and a large outside terrace seating area. The kitchen whips up authentic pan-Asian (mostly Thai) food (snacks from around HK$35 , mains from around HK$62 ) six days a week.
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Fountainhead Drinking Bar
The cheerfully no-frills Fountainhead has a good mix of Chinese and expats in regular attendance, decent music and beer at affordable prices.
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Globe
This tiny, unpretentious place gets packed out after work with expats thirsting for one (or more) of the 60 lagers, beers and real ales from around the world that are available here.
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Homebase
A meet 'n' greet for the styled and beautiful early on, this place turns into a bump 'n' grind after hours (cover around HK$100 ). It's one of the more popular after-hours venues and one of the few places that is still partying well after dawn in a city that does, in fact, sleep. Great house and breakbeat music, small dance floor. Friday's generous happy hour is for gays and lesbians.
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Inn Side Out & East End Brewery
These two related pubs flank a central covered terrace where you can while away the hours on a warm evening, sipping beers and throwing peanut shells on the ground. East End has imported microbrews, and also has a Quarry Bay branch.
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Joe Banana's
JB's, in Wan Chai forever (or at least since we were bopping and grooving), has dropped its long-standing wet T-shirt/boxers aesthetic and gone for more of a bamboo-bar feel. The dancing is good and it's always a fun night out.
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Kangaroo Downunder
This well-scrubbed successor to the infamous Kangaroo Pub in Tsim Sha Tsui is more of a lounge bar-cum-restaurant than the erstwhile pub, but it's popular with young Australians and other expats nonetheless.
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La Dolce Vita
This is a popular place for postwork brews, with room to prop on the heart-shaped bar or stand on the terrace and watch the preening mob crawl by.
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Le Jardin
Don't imagine a breezy oasis - 'The Garden' is no more than an enclosed veranda - but this is still an attractive bar with loads of atmosphere. The mostly expat crowd enjoys itself without getting too boisterous.
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Lipstick Lounge (in Wasabisabi)
This Japanese restaurant in the Times Square shopping mall, with out-of-this-world décor (cable vines, rondo lounges, faux birch forest) transforms each night into the camp Lipstick Lounge.
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Lotus
This cool little style bar takes the art of mixing cocktails to entertaining extremes. With a nod to molecular gastronomy it plays with taste and texture by foaming, heating and freezing various ingredients. Silly but fun.
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Maya
This lovely new bar, whose name apparently means 'illusion' in Sanskrit, is a design-minded oasis in Wan Chai. We love the bold black-and-white patterns on the wall, the bright red bar and the (almost) never-ending happy/relaxing/two-for-one hour(s).
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Mes Amis
This easygoing bar may be in the lap - so to speak - of girly club land but is poles (again, as it were) apart. It has a good range of wines and a Mediterranean-style snack list. There's a DJ from on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night.
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Mo Bar
If you can't face the crush of Central's usual drinking haunts and perhaps want to catch up with a chat, the swish MO Bar, attached to the Mandarin's new swanky outpost, offers peace, repose, soft lighting and a high-end drinks list of wines and cocktails.
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Morocco's Bar & Restaurant
The exodus of expats from Cheung Chau over the past years has left the island all but bereft of quality drinking venues, but there will always be Morocco's on the waterfront. It also does decent Indian food.
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Neptune Disco II
Neptune II is a fun club with a mostly Filipino crowd and a rockin' covers band. If everything's closing and you can't bear to stop bopping, this is the place to head for. It really rocks at the Sunday afternoon-tea dance starting at .
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New Makati Pub & Disco
It has to be said: you can't go lower than this sleazy pick-up joint, named after a Manila neighbourhood. Imagine dimly lit booths, Filipino amahs and middle-aged white male booze hounds, who all just wanna have fun. It is a friendly place to dance the morning away, though.
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New Wally Matt Lounge
The name comes from the old Waltzing Matilda pub, which was one of the daggiest gay watering holes in creation. But New Wally Matt is an upbeat and busy place and actually more a pub than a lounge.
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Old China Hand
This place is hardly recognisable as the gloomy old dive where the desperate-to-drink (no one we know) used to find themselves unhappy but never alone at . Now it's got a generous happy hour, Internet access and cheap set lunches.
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Patio Café
This open-air, café-cum-pub attached to the windsurfing centre at Tung Wan Beach, known locally as Lai Kam's in honour of its owner, is a Cheung Chau institution. Come here for a sundowner.
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Poets
This friendly workaday pub with literary aspirations is a pleasant place for a pint and serves typical pub meals such as pies, chips and beans for around HK$60 .
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Red Bar
A fantastic combination of al fresco drinking and harbour views is hard to beat on Hong Kong Island. DJs playing funk and jazz turn up the volume as the weekend approaches.
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Red Rock
This attractive place, backing onto the walkway above Lan Kwai Fong, is a very successful chameleon: a decent Italian restaurant at lunch and dinner and a popular dance venue by night (cover around HK$100 ). A dozen cocktails and as many shooters go for half-price at happy hour.
