CBD restaurants and bars in Hong Kong adding a cannabinoid chill to your beer, coffee, cocktails, cheesecake and more
- Hong Kong’s first CBD-themed restaurant Med Chef infuse the cannabinoid in its entire menu while hipster bars like The Poet and Boticario add droppers into cocktails
- Japanese tea shop Matchali serve CBD tea, Young Master Brewery offers a CBD pale ale called Hea and Soulgood load up its Basque burnt cheesecake
By now, CBD, or cannabidiol, has become such a prevalent ingredient and stand-alone product that questions of what it is (and whether or not it’ll get you high) seem superfluous.
You can buy it in tinctures or capsules or gummies, find it in your skincare and add it to your coffee; you can dose your dog or even rub it on your sore muscles.
It’s also getting even easier to find single-sized servings of CBD to test out its effects in different circumstances, whether from small home bakeries churning out cookies embedded with the hemp-derived ingredient, or hip bars such as The Poet and Boticario adding droppers-full into cocktails. Soulgood, that specialises in Basque burnt cheesecake, even launched a CBD-infused version in August, the first bakery to do so in Hong Kong.
Most of the manifestations we see are in the form of take-home snacks – so customers can enjoy a little Netflix and really chill – or in drinks that are served after hours when the dangers of overrelaxation will not affect your office work, but at Med Chef, a new restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui, you can get CBD infused throughout your entire meal.
It’s an approach that founder Kelvin Yeung thinks will allow more people to try out the effects of CBD for the first time.
“People usually discover CBD products via e-commerce, and the trustworthiness can be questioned,” he says. “They are mostly in tinctures and pills, which give the impression of medicine or supplements, which might make some people reluctant to try them.
“Med Chef provides a comfortable environment in which anyone would feel safe to try CBD for the first time. Our restaurant dish prices are not marked up, nor is food quality sacrificed – we hope to provide a more casual and approachable way for people to sit down and relax with their loved ones.”
Given that the entire meal is infused with CBD, dosage per individual can vary, meaning the restaurant needs to take into account the fact that meals might be shared around, or that different people might order a different number of courses.