Seoul bar Zest made a splash at The World’s 50 Best Bars 2023, sponsored by Perrier, with its debut at No.18 – the highest ranking for any Korean venue in the history of the 50 Best Bars list. Nick Coldicott reports on what is making this drinking hole the talk of the global bar scene
The four friends who teamed up to open Zest in Seoul in late 2020 knew they would have some level of success. Jisu Park, Sean Woo, Noah Kwon and Demie Kim all had 50 Best Bars pedigree – at Alice (No.28 on Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2023) and Charles H (which reached No.7 on Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2022) – but Zest hadn’t even turned three years old when it made The World’s 50 Best Bars 2023 list, rocketing in at No.18 to bag the Disaronno Highest New Entry Award. Here are five reasons why you need to book your flight and visit this rising star of the global bar scene as soon as you can.
1. It’s the best place in Seoul for daytime drinking
Zest's unmistakable orange glow lures in the pedestrians of Seoul
It’s a cool, rainy Sunday afternoon in Seoul. The overcast sky makes the city look cinematically monochrome and the streets are understandably barren. It’s staying-in weather. But on one narrow road in the Cheongdam district, an orange glow draws you to a window that frames a bustling bar room. Zest is packed, even on an afternoon like this.
When Zest’s co-founders were sketching out their plan for the bar, they agreed it should be warm and inviting. Most of Seoul’s best bars are underground, often with some kind of speakeasy facade, the harder to enter the better. The Zest quartet wanted the opposite. “That’s why we have that big window and all-natural materials like clay, stone and wood,” says co-founder Jisu Park.
The aesthetic is minimalist: no clutter of brands on the back shelves, just bottles of homemade seasonal gins with elegant pastel labels, a tree branch here, a vase there, all glowing under the ambient lighting. You could convert it into an Aesop store without breaking a sweat.
The genius of the design becomes apparent if you arrive early enough to watch the daylight fade. The window frames an industrial view, all concrete and gunmetal doors with stacks of air conditioners. As the sun sets, the scene outside turns harsher and the candescent interior feels ever cosier.
The early opening hours were originally a survival measure, since Zest opened in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic when bars throughout Korea had to close by 9 pm, but the constraint turned out to be a blessing, showing the four founders that as long as they were open, people would come.
Recommended afternoon sips include the Jeju Garibaldi – a clever twist on the classic, using fluffy juice of carrots and hallabong citrus – and a soju-based riff on the Moscow Mule, which is even more refreshing than the original thanks to a bright ginger kombucha.
2. It’s a zero-waste bartending trailblazer
The Z&T, Zest's take on a gin and tonic, uses mixer made in-house
Zest’s menu offers 19 fine examples of creative, modern cocktails, but regular guests like to go off-piste and order a classic. When those drinks are French 75s or Old Cubans, the chances are high that there’s some not-so-sparkling Champagne left two days later. At Zest, that goes into a pot with homemade citrus stock to be turned into a jelly to garnish their millet-soju-based Negroni riff, Nutty & Bitter.
Zest’s colas, tonics and sodas are house made and poured from reusable bottles, so the garbage bin at the end of a shift contains no cans or plastic bottles. The honey for the Bee’s Knees is from an urban farmer in Seoul, and the cocktail picks are made from rosemary springs. The rosemary leaves go into the seasonal gins, the latest of which also contains “bad apples” – the fruit the farmers would otherwise throw away. Co-founder Sean Woo says it took them some time to persuade farmers to part with their malformed produce; currently they’re searching for ugly strawberries for their winter gin.
“When we were planning [the bar] we wrote down a lot of keywords that we wanted to see – like minimal, local, seasonal – and they all came under the same heading: sustainable. Even the name of the bar references the idea: it’s a portmanteau of ‘zero waste’,” he says.
Woo is quick to namecheck those whose ideas they’ve adopted – Matt Whiley of Sydney’s Re (winner of the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award 2021), Luke Whearty of Melbourne’s Byrdi (No.61 in The World’s 50 Best Bars 2023), and the Trash Tiki project founded by Kelsey Ramage – but at Zest they’re building a uniquely Korean version, tailored to the peculiarities of the local market.
3. It offers Korean fine drinking
Bee's Knees uses raw honey sourced from urban beekeepers in Seoul
“Korean people think that everything [alcoholic] made in Korea is going to be shabby,” says Woo, a certified Korean liquor sommelier who spent two years studying his country’s brewing and distilling culture at the Korea Liquor Lab. “We want to change that perception.”
A third of the cocktails incorporate Korean wines, brews or spirits. The Oh My Gibson gets its texture and mouth-watering acidity from an artisanal sour yakju (clear rice brew); the Sikhye Milk Punch is built around a soju distilled from the cream of a makgeolli (raw rice wine) by an artisan who trained at Ardbeg; and the coconut notes in the Piña Colada-esque No Coconut Here are all from an extraordinary over-proof makgeolli that tastes nothing like the astringent versions of the brew that make it to foreign shores.
Woo says most people probably haven’t even tasted good makgeolli because the best stuff doesn’t travel well. “You have to drink it quite fresh,” he says – ideally blended with Korean spiced rum, pumpkin sikhye (a sweet Korean rice drink), milk whey and amaro dust.
4. It’s a launch pad for bar hopping
Two of Seoul's other lauded bars, Alice and Le Chamber (L to R), are under five minutes' walk from Zest
Seoul is a big city, home to 10 million people and occupying more land than Chicago, but most of its best bars are crammed into a sliver of the ritzy Cheongdam district. In fact, you could take a world-class tour without leaving the three-block street called Dosan Daero on which Zest sits.
At the northern end is Alice, the maximalist lounge (ranked No.28 on Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2023) in which three of Zest’s co-founders honed their bartending chops and plotted their future bar. Two doors down is a whisky bar named after, but unconnected to, the Japanese pop-rockers Mr Children. There you can sip rare single malts, including Korea’s own Ki-One, or top-class whisky cocktails (the Ardbeg Project, for one).
Across the street, Diageo Reserve World Class champions Lim Jae-jin and Eom Do-hwan serve yuzu White Ladies and other fine cocktails in Asia’s 50 Best Bars stalwart Le Chamber. Classic cocktails are the forte of Lion’s Den, which looks as though it was plucked straight from the streets of Tokyo – because that’s roughly what happened: it’s the sister of an elite Ginza bar by the same name. And at the foot of the street, to round off the night, is Still, a cigar bar run by the people behind Le Chamber.
5. It’s the vanguard of Korean bar culture-1.jpg)
The Zest team collected their third 50 Best accolade of the year on stage in Singapore
The history of bartending in South Korea is brief but dizzying, with bartenders looking west, then east, then west again for inspiration. Just 30 years ago there wasn’t a scene to speak of. American-style flair bars were the first to get people thinking beyond beer and soju shots, then it all went Japanese-y, with bartenders either hailing from or mimicking the style of the island across the water.
“Back then all the bars were influenced by Japan. There was no diversity,” says Woo. "And then when Alice came in, it was sensational. A very funky style of bartending and people were fun.” Cue a slew of colourful, less ceremonial brethren.
Now, Zest feels like the next step: contemporary, international, sophisticated, fun and utterly, authentically Korean.
Miss this year's ceremony? Watch the highlights here:
The 15th edition of The World’s 50 Best Bars, sponsored by Perrier, was announced on Tuesday, 17th October 2023 in Singapore. To stay up to date with the latest news and announcements, browse the website, follow us on Instagram, find us on Facebook, visit us on X and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
