13 Nov NEWS: We’re opening a new bar in Chinatown!

If you haven’t already heard it from our (herd of) horses’ mouths, we’re opening a new bar in Sydney’s Chinatown!

We’ve been in the back laneway space fitting it out for several months now, with all the usual delays and then some. But a Chinatown bar is a long-held vision for Jason and the Tokyo Bird team. In fact, we looked at Chinatown locations when looking to open Tokyo Bird more than four years ago.

Sydney’s Chinatown is a renowned food destination, especially for Cantonese yum cha and seafood restaurants and Northern Chinese dumplings and noodles. Now you can come to Chinatown for almost any Asian cuisine: there’s Thai-natown and Korea-town, some of the city’s best Malaysian, and increasingly regional Chinese cuisines (think Chongqing noodles and Sichuan hotpot) and niches, like yoghurt rice and omnipresent bubble tea!

But what about the drinks of an alcoholic persuasion? There’s a serious lack of decent drinking to be had in Chinatown, and that’s not even talking about cocktails. Especially compared to Melbourne’s Chinatown, Sydney Chinatown has some catching up to do and we’re ready to get the race underway.

Banchō Bar is a cocktail bar but like Tokyo Bird, we’re serious about our bar snacks. And like Tokyo Bird, we’ve got a large back bar of whisky: Japanese, Scotch, American, Taiwanese, Australian and more. And like Tokyo Bird, we’re hidden in a quiet little laneway that you’ll need to put some effort in to find.

You’ll see some familiar faces in Yoshi, Luke, Jason, Chris and Tina, and some new faces in Chad, Vinh and Fresno. You’ll see food on skewers, but kushikatsu style rather than Tokyo Bird’s yakitori. Most importantly, you’ll see our same dedication to delicious drinks and friendly service that you know us for. And you’ll see that Sydney’s Chinatown can have a decent drinking spot!

We look forward to welcoming you to Banchō. 

Check out what Australian Bartender had to say about us.

Banchō
10 Thomas Lane
Haymarket NSW 2000
@banchobar

Drop in and visit us this week while we’re sort of, kind of semi-officially open…