Why Aaron Chan’s Club Qing in Lan Kwai Fong is the perfect blend of high-end whisky bar and izakaya
Aaron Chan reveals why he chose to open his whisky bar – which has a staggering range of entry-level drams and exclusive private bottles – in Hong Kong’s party district LKF
When British tabloid newspaper The Sun wrote about Lan Kwai Fong in 2015, it reported on pools of vomit, drunken fights at the taxi rank and a woman stripping in the street.
It was an exaggerated portrait of the neighbourhood; nonetheless, Hong Kong’s ground zero for partying is one of the last places you’d expect to find a high-end whisky bar. Yet, above the fray – and the cheap shots and chasers – sits Club Qing, a haven of calm and home to some of the rarest whiskies on the planet.
Founder Aaron Chan, a former investment banker, has no regrets about the site. Highlighting the area’s convenient location next to Hong Kong’s central business district, Chan says, “If I had to pick again, I’d still choose Lan Kwai Fong.”
Club Qing, which eschews the stuffy members’ club atmosphere of many a whisky bar for a slightly more casual izakaya vibe, has a range of whiskies, from entry-level drams to private bottles exclusive to the bar.
Chan himself has a personal collection of some 2,000 bottles. The centrepiece of his cache is a complete set of 54 whiskies in the Ichiro’s Malt Card Series, which the owner believes is one of only a handful in the world. The bottles, each decorated with a different illustration of a playing card on its label, were released intermittently between 2005 and 2014. Chan secured his first piece in the set in 2007 and had to wait another eight years to complete it. “A lot of things in life take time,” he says calmly. “You have to be very patient and determined to get what you want.”
Is it essential to wait for a good whisky, though? Not necessarily, Chan says. “I have had eight-year-old whiskies that are fantastic. I’ve had 65-year-old whiskies that are terrible. I tend to find that whiskies between 18 and 25 years old are the best.”
Turning philosophical, Chan muses, “For life, it’s slightly different. People of the older generation have a lot of wisdom and experience that you can only accumulate with time. I respect that. Young people, though, are very creative. They’re spontaneous, they have passion and they are not bound by the rules. It works both ways.”