Peridot – Hong Kong’s sky-high playground for radical food and rare spirits
Topping Central’s Zaha Hadid-designed The Henderson building, this new cocktail bar and restaurant offers a vision all of its own
Which is all to say that upon entering Peridot, the newly opened cocktail bar and plant-based restaurant on the 38th floor of the skyscraper, the sense of vertigo that washes over me seems entirely natural. Upholstered in a pale moss green that takes after the venue’s namesake, an August birthstone, the amorphous interior, designed by Toronto-based Studio Paolo Ferrari, is accented by thousands of acrylic diodes fixed into the walls that are meant to evoke a shattered disco ball. It feels like slipping into a different dimension.
Sitting in the middle of this surreal space are François Cavelier, The Henderson’s beverage director, and chef Lisandro Illa, the bar cuisine director, deep in discussion, heads bent together. They peer intently at notebooks and binders through almost identical pairs of black, thick-rimmed Tom Ford glasses, giving the uncanny impression that they could have been each other in a parallel universe. Cavelier is neatly dressed in a grey suit and tie, with cropped hair and a deceptively stern countenance. In direct contrast, Illa wouldn’t be out of place in a Rick Owens ad, with his low, mussed ponytail, drapey black clothing and chunky silver jewellery.
Cavelier’s concept for the drinks programme revolves around terroir, perambulating from region to region each season. Currently, the focus is on Kagoshima, in southern Japan, the birthplace of shochu. He has used ingredients such as komikan, durian and beni imo sweet potato to create 15 cocktails and mocktails, each prefaced with its own origin story of sorts, penned by Cavelier to be both strangely specific and evocative of the mood the drink conveys.
“I was worried the programme would be an empty shell, just making beautiful drinks to fill up the menu,” says Cavelier, who wanted his ideas to have roots. “Something deep.”