Now comes Corsican Stars, a novel, members-only concept with an elaborate mythological narrative, immersive artwork and a seasonal cocktail menu designed to entice a specific type of curious drinker.
The hidden bar is inspired by the line “Find me beneath the Corsican Stars, where we first kissed” from the sci-fi film Cloud Atlas (2012), based on English writer David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name.
For its soft opening from January to March, the bar has been conducting 90-minute invitation-only cocktail tours, after which each participant is given a token that can only otherwise be won through lucky draws on social media and in the public storefront of Causeway Bay vinyl cafe Mercury Recalls, or obtained by buying credit via the restaurant’s VIP programme.
“Wanting to share our aesthetics, interests and tastes, we created Mercury Recalls based on the concept that Mercury is the planet of soul and spirituality,” says Alvis Pang Shing-ho, co-founder and head bartender of Corsican Stars.
“This Causeway Bay storefront has a difficult floor plan with many pillars, but we really liked this space and wanted to make it work. That’s how the ‘hidden bar’ idea was born out of Mercury.”
The concealed drinking room officially opens in April, but only to those with access tokens, which will be given to staff at Mercury Recalls; each will grant admission to three guests.
Pang says: “We don’t advertise it as a ‘speakeasy’, because it defeats the purpose. What we want to manifest is an atmosphere of like-minded people, and we’ll seek out different guests each season to find mutual inspiration and exchange.”
While Mercury Recalls and its sister venture Lost Stars, a livehouse in Tai Kok Tsui, have a heavy focus on vinyl and live music, Corsican Stars aims to bring in soundscape artists to build a one-of-a-kind sensory experience.
The members-only bar can accommodate a maximum of 20 people at a time and will be open four evenings a week.
Upon passing through the concealed door inside Mercury Recalls, guests enter a foyer where they see digital art commissioned by Corsican Stars before moving deeper inside.
Currently, the foyer art takes the form of a three-minute video by Hong Kong-based creative studio Xcept, titled Perpetual Records and showing irregular architectural fragments emerging on a floor-to-ceiling screen.
It’s a distinctive way of entering a bar, to say the least. The immersive artwork is designed to act almost like a trailer, preparing the viewer for what is to come.
“Perpetual Records asks, ‘How do we view our internal universes and innermost thoughts?’,” Pang explains. “It comes from the New-Age idea of the akashic record, a database that is all-knowing, all-encompassing and documents all of human consciousness and our past, present and future.”
The art will change with the seasons, and each new theme will inform a different set of cocktails to be served at the bar. The menu pairs each drink with a sacred geometric symbol and its own short story, with bartenders explaining how different ingredients and infusions link back to scenes from the artwork, and how each flavour profile relates to different aspects of the story.
For its soft opening, Corsican Stars is serving concoctions such as an alcoholic shot infused with Japanese bonito soup, which drinkers receive at the beginning of the cocktail tour. There’s also a cocktail of carbonated guava juice, white bitter melon-infused tequila and kombu caviar and, as an end note, a non-alcoholic shot of cold-pressed black tomato juice from the Netherlands.
One cocktail tells the story of a girl who does not drink – it is a refreshing, sweet version of the classic gin and tonic but with lychee, adorned with flowers to give it an innocent look.
None of the drinks have names, leaving each guest to interpret their meaning and adding to the mystique of the bar.
Corsican Stars, inside Mercury Recalls, Shop A, G/F, Fairview Mansion, 51 Paterson Street, Causeway Bay.
