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Zest

Seoul

• Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award 2024

In a city packed with speakeasy bars, Zest stands out for its striking facade and big, welcoming, street-level window. Inside, a golden glow lights a minimalist room of stone, clay and wood, where the only bottles on view are the homemade gins distilled from local, seasonal produce.

The bar’s name is a portmanteau of ‘zero’ and ‘waste’ and the team pursue sustainability in all their cocktail recipes. The juice, peel and pulp of a fruit will be used in three different drinks; spent spices and coffee grounds find new uses and the tonic in the signature Z&T is made in-house to avoid crates of empty bottles at the end of the night.

Zest’s focus on the local means plenty of Korean beverages, from the familiar to the obscure. Soju and makgeolli? Of course. But also yakju, sikhye and gosori-sool incorporated into the inventive cocktails. It’s no wonder then that the bar took home the Ketel One Sustainable Bar Award as part of The World’s 50 Best Bars 2024.

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