Ozone

Ozone sits on the 118th floor of the ICC tower in West Kowloon, inside the Ritz-Carlton, and holds the distinction of being the highest bar in the world — a fact I found more impressive in theory than I expected to find it in practice, right up until the high-speed elevator opened onto the space itself and the entire harbour dropped away beneath the windows like a scale model. Lia and I went for a friend’s birthday, dressed up more than either of us usually bothers with, and spent the first ten minutes doing nothing but walking the perimeter with our phones out, which I’m fairly sure is exactly what every single person who has ever visited Ozone has also done.

The cocktail programme is genuinely good, not just an afterthought to the view, with a menu that leans into modern techniques and local ingredients — a gin cocktail built around dried mandarin peel and Sichuan pepper became the drink I kept ordering the rest of the night. But nobody is pretending the drinks are the main draw. The main draw is the fact that Hong Kong Island’s entire skyline, Victoria Harbour, and the mountains behind it are all visible simultaneously from a single seat, an angle on the city I hadn’t gotten anywhere else despite having done the Peak, done Sky100, done the various rooftop bars in Central. There’s an outdoor terrace section too, wind-buffeted and slightly precarious-feeling at that height, that gives you the same view without glass between you and it.

It’s not cheap, and the dress code is enforced in a way that a lot of Hong Kong bars don’t bother with, but as a once-per-trip splurge it earns its reputation. We stayed until the crowd thinned around 1am, and by then the harbour lights had settled into that late-night pattern where the ferries stop and only the container ships and the occasional junk boat still move across the water.

When to go: Just before sunset to catch the transition from daylight to the full lit-up skyline. Reservations are strongly recommended on weekends, and smart-casual dress code is enforced, so leave the shorts and sandals at the hotel.