Where waste becomes something worth drinking, behind Shanghai cocktail scene

There's a moment, usually somewhere around the second drink, when you start paying attention to the details at Penicillin Shanghai. The bar counter lined with small amber bottles. The upstairs lab visible through glass, where something is always fermenting or distilling or quietly becoming something else. The entrance, where the stump of a fallen Chinese hackberry tree hangs suspended from the ceiling like a piece of installation art — because that's exactly what it is.

Penicillin Shanghai is the latest chapter in a story that started in Hong Kong. When founders Agung and Laura Prabowo opened the original bar there in 2020, it arrived quietly and left a mark — eventually becoming an award winning bar in a city that takes its cocktails seriously. The concept was built around a closed-loop model: nothing wasted, everything repurposed. Discarded ingredients get a second life through fermentation, infusion, distillation. The leftovers, in other words, become the point.

The Interior at Penicillin Shanghai

The interior makes the philosophy physical. That hackberry stump at the entrance — a tree that fell, repurposed rather than discarded it sets the tone before you've ordered anything. The bar top holds rows of bottles, each one a different experiment in what can be extracted, preserved, or transformed from ingredients that most kitchens would have composted. The moss-covered counter upstairs, framed under industrial lighting and open to the garden beyond, looks like something between a science lab and a forest floor. It's a little surreal. It works completely.