Inside Mius, the bar where Shelley Tai is quietly rewriting Hong Kong hospitality

Shelley Tai is not the loudest person in the room. She’s a soft-spoken Hong Kong-born bartender whose 16-year career runs through the city’s nightclub circuit, one of Hong Kong’s most acclaimed cocktail bars, and five years in Singapore before she came home to open Mius. Today, the bar is one of Sheung Wan’s most sought-after spots, with queues forming on Gough Street before the doors open at 5 pm.

On the surface, the bar is deceptively simple – 14 cocktails, none with more than six ingredients, bartenders in plain outfits, volume kept low. Beneath that are many years of insight and hard work.

The call that confirmed it all came when she was at a family wedding in Japan. Emma Sleight, director of content and creative for Asia’s 50 Best Bars, rang to tell her she’d won the Altos Bartenders’ Bartender Award 2026 – the only accolade in the programme voted on entirely by fellow bartenders from ranked venues across the region.

“I was very surprised,” Tai says. “I always felt that this kind of award is for people who are more outspoken or more active in the industry.” She paused before saying, “I didn’t think people were really looking at what I do.”

Shelley Tai left home at 16

Tai’s story begins in adolescence. “I was a very naughty and rebellious kid,” she says. At 16, she left home and stayed with friends before moving out on her own at 18. The motivation behind everything that followed was straightforward. “I really needed a job to pay rent.”

Her mother took a long time to see what she was building. The first time she came to watch her daughter work was after Tai had already moved to Singapore, and she also turned up at a Hong Kong event, had a few drinks, and went home. She’s been to Mius now. 

“I don’t think she fully understood what I did before,” Tai says. “Not because she wasn’t supportive, but because it’s a profession that’s difficult to understand unless you experience it firsthand. More than the bar, I think she understands why I chose this career, and why I’ve stayed in it for so many years.”

Tai tried fashion merchandising at first and, at around 20, picked up work at a bar on the side – before moving into full-time hospitality at FINDS, a Nordic restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui. From there, she went into the nightclubs of SoHo, working 8 pm to 7 am shifts and loving it – the energy, the friendships, the camaraderie of people who work while the city sleeps. A few years in, it wore her down. “You finish work at 7 am, and then we’d continue drinking sometimes until 11. At one point, it was too much for my body,” she says.

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What pulled her out of the nightclub circuit was a single drink. A friend took her to a Japanese cocktail bar in Causeway Bay, and she ordered a Last Word – gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino, fresh lime, equal parts.

“It tasted nothing like what I had before,” she says. “I used to make gin and tonics, whiskey cokes, watermelon martinis. I didn’t really have that kind of classic cocktail in my dictionary.” She only went once, but it was enough.

She left the clubs, walked into Quinary – one of Hong Kong’s most respected cocktail bars – and started again from the bottom, washing glasses under mentor Antonio Lai before earning her place behind the bar. In 2019, she won the Diageo World Class Hong Kong and Macau title. Her winning drink was savoury and floral – gin, dry vermouth, fennel pollen, gentian, olive.

How Singapore made Shelley Tai a leader

Tai moved to Singapore in late 2020, recruited by entrepreneur Colin Chia to help reopen Nutmeg & Clove mid-pandemic. Over five years, she rose to become operations director of the entire Nutmeg Collective, managing people, building culture, holding a team together across multiple venues.

“When I was at Quinary, I was really focused on myself and my craft,” she says. “In Singapore, I learned how to work with different people, how to groom a team and build a stronger culture. That’s probably the biggest lesson from these 16 years.” She read constantly during this period – management, communication, leadership. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel sits on her bedside table now.

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By late 2024, she’d hit a wall. “I’d been thinking of everyone else’s growth, but my own progression had stopped.” The idea of coming home and opening her own bar wasn’t a long-held dream – she’d always imagined herself helping other people open theirs. But the idea arrived, and she followed it. She resigned in January 2025, left Singapore in June, and opened Mius in August. “Nervous and excited, not stressed,” she says, was how she felt at the time.

What Mius is

Designed by Kevin Yiu of Minus Workshop, the 1,400 sq ft space is a former home appliance store with a single brief behind it, which was to shut out Gough Street. Blackout glazing seals off the city. A 4.3-metre bar counter runs down the middle of the room. It’s the kind of room, as Tai puts it, you want to keep coming back to.

The bar is, in every sense, a reflection of how Tai thinks. Fourteen cocktails, no gimmicks. If there’s a concept, it’s the restraint itself. The signature serve is a highball made with frozen whisky and chilled Japanese soda, no ice. She drinks one with her team after almost every closing shift.

She has 16 staff now. She tells them why things need to be done, not just that they have to do them. “I always give them a reason,” she says. “They learn how you think, and that’s more useful long-term.”

What guests keep saying, months in, is that the bar feels like her. “Finally,” she says, “here’s a place where I can make all the decisions based on what I like and the culture I want to build.”

Asked who she’d want to call today and say thank you, she doesn’t hesitate. Antonio Lai, who gave her the chance at Quinary when she turned up asking to wash glasses. And Colin Chia, who brought her to Singapore and built bars alongside her for five years. Both appear in her award video. “They gave me very different opportunities,” she says. “They are my mentors.”

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The full list and the Best Bar in Asia title will be revealed at the ceremony on 28 July at Wynn Palace in Macao. Until then, there’s still a bar to run. When asked what the 20-year-old who took on bar work to cover rent would make of all this, Tai doesn’t take long to answer. 

“Unbelievable,” she says. “Every step I’ve taken, I never really thought about what it would bring me. From nightclubs to washing glasses at Quinary, to Singapore, back to Hong Kong – I never thought what each decision would bring me. But it always brought me further.”

She doesn’t have a plan for what’s next. If the team is ready, she’ll groom them into leaders. If an opportunity makes sense, she’ll take it. She’s not a person with a lot of planning, she says. She’ll see where life brings her.

For someone who left home at 16 with a rent bill and a willingness to figure it out, that’s always been the whole approach – and it’s brought her further than most plans would have.