FROM SHANGHAI WITH LOVE

Junior The Pocket Bar invokes the nocturnal glamour and grit of 1930s Shanghai with its latest iteration.

- INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

SHANGHAI IS A SUPER-CITY. It has always been that way — not merely because of the miracle of its birth but also because of the unending celebration that its birth inspires. The splendours of the city transcend the imagination; its contemporaneity is both bewitching and formidable. There aren’t many like it, and perhaps there never will be. It will take lifetimes to find out. But Shanghai’s force is easy to feel. The newest, most delectable case in point is Volume 11: The Bund, Junior The Pocket Bar’s latest conceptual unveiling, which is a distinctly exquisite reimagining of 1930s Shanghai. In their chunk of the multiverse,

Owner and Head Bartender Hazel Long and Head Chef Didi Sidek tell the tale of back-in-the-day Shanghai in the future destined language of their craft, presenting a thoroughly transportive experience that suffuses the tangibles and intangibles of the property.

As an ever-rotating concept, Junior operates on a spirit of creative restlessness, whose flourishes accrue into a more-thanthe-sum-of-its-parts totality. As always, the care for the teeming detail the visitor is treated to is matched by an ingenuity reverent of the source but not beholden to its rules. There are no gimmicks here.

Cross this new threshold; Shanghai beckons.

Welcome Tea