A tale of two bars: one now closed; the other of which may still be around but has been negatively affected by the pandemic too

 

My favourite drink at my favorite bar in Hong Kong

often comes with a heart-shaped lemon peel :)

 

For a number of years, my favorite place to hang out and drink in Hong Kong was Sake Bar Ginn.  I'd go there once a week and felt privileged to be counted as a regular there.  Over time, I made a number of friends there who were more than just drinking buddies -- in that we'd often meet up outside of our favorite sake bar as well as over there.      

 

A year or so ago, Sake Bar Ginn closed down.  If truth be told, I haven't missed it much as I stopped going to it more than a year before its Japanese owner decided to call time on not only her establishment but also her time in Hong Kong (due to diminishing economic returns here; thanks in no small part to not only the pandemic but Hong Kong's anti-pandemic measures that have included, for some months, the closing of bars).  

 

One reason for my deciding against spending (much) time there in recent years was that someone who was even more than a regular there than I was was very vocally "blue".  And while I could tolerate his pro-Beijing and -police rantings before June 12th, 2019, I couldn't after that fateful day.  (Ironically, two other Sake Bar Ginn regulars became two of my "protest buddies" -- in that we went on a number of anti-extradition bill-turned-general pro-democracy protest marches and rallies together in 2019 and into 2020.)           

The other reason was that Covid happened -- and for a good part of the pandemic, I've been reluctant to spend time in bars, especially ones located in frequently crowded party areas like Lan Kwai Fong (which Sake Bar Ginn was), where one frequently had to run a veritable gauntlet through upon leaving late at night (and sometimes also when going over there earlier in the evening).  And I have to say that the last time I went to my once favorite bar, before masking became required in Hong Kong, I was put off by being in a small lift with a bunch of unmasked folks, two of whom ended up going into Sake Bar Ginn before me.

 

A measure of how much the pandemic has impacted/changed my lifestyle is that whereas I used to go to bars weekly (and often more than once a week) pre-pandemic, I can count on my two hands the number of times I've been to an actual bar in the past two years (and pubs not at all).  And all of my bar visits have actually been to only one drinking establishment: located in a building where it is the only establishment of its kind there, in an area that's associated far more with other activities besides drinking.  

This particular bar has been around for years and has built up a loyal clientele.  But in recent years, it's suffered from a significant loss of business.  One reason is that many of its Japanese clients (it's another bar owned and operated by a Japanese national) decided to leave Hong Kong -- or were sent back home by their companies.  Something else that also negatively affected its business is the reluctance of many people -- like me -- to go to bars during the pandemic.

 

And this particularly so after the government introduced a strange extra requirement for bars that have bar licenses (as opposed to restaurant or cafe licenses -- something that a number of (primarily) drinking establishments rushed to do in the past year or so) in June of this year: namely, that customers would have to take a Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) within 24 hours prior to entering a bar and show that they had a negative result from it.  This on top of being required to use the Leave Home Safe trac(k)ing app and show proof of one having been fully vaccinated (something which currently stands at three shots of a Covid vaccine) -- like with restaurants, cafes, cinemas and many other venues.

 

The proprietor of my current favorite Hong Kong bar estimates that his business dropped by 70 percent after this requirement was introduced -- and, for a time, talked of closing down before the end of this year.  Happily (for me and other fans of his cocktails and his bar's extensive selection of whiskies), he and the bar are still around currently -- and I am sure that he'll feel some relief at today's news that, starting from this Thursday, the RAT requirement is to be scrapped. 

Still, one has to wonder: is all this too little too late?  How much extra time has this particular relaxation of an unpopular regulation bought him and his business?  "Addressing reporters at a press conference on Tuesday, Under Secretary for Health Libby Lee said the latest relaxations will come into effect on Thursday. “We hope to have some easing [of policies] but we also have to be careful about the pace,” Lee said."  But while it may sound like she thinks that Hong Kong is the turtle that will eventually win the race (over the rest of the world's hare), my sense is that the rest of the world (including many in Hong Kong) are more inclined to think that the Hong Kong government consists of a bunch of clueless cuckoos than reliable, slow and steady turtles!

In fact, just this morning, the Hong Kong Free Press ran a piece in which a Hong Kong medical expert, microbiologist Ho Pak-leung, sounded like even he had grown impatient and frustrated at what's been going on in the Big Lychee and openly "hoped the government would speed up its return to normalcy."  And while Under Secretary for Health Libby Lee (and her boss, Health Secretary Lo Chung-mau) may think otherwise, Dr Ho has also put it on the record that he reckons that "the city’s authorities should focus on protecting people in need and scrap “ineffective” Covid-19 measures such as testing, isolation and the use of the government’s tracing app LeaveHomeSafe"!