The irony of Press Release is that it doesn’t exactly announce its arrival. The tiny bar is behind a Southeast Asian restaurant which is behind an Italian restaurant. Neither the Southeast Asian place nor the Italian place is any good. Needless to say, we did not expect much from Press Release.
But then. One step inside PR’s stunningly hip, neon-accented barroom, and we feel a world away from the mediocre mall restaurants. And then, when we sip a glass of house wine (RMB50), we’re really sold. The Italian vintage (RMB65) is the best house wine we’ve had in recent memory, and it’s just as unexpectedly bangin’ as this the bar’s decor, which features vintage typewriters and indie magazines. “Why does every wine bar have jazz music and pictures of vineyards on the wall?” muses founder Issey Lin.
Press Release is an oddity, but it owns its weirdness. Lin isn’t a professional wino, but she knows wine; she isn’t a trained mixologist, but her sous-vide cocktails are out of this world. The Dazed – a red wine cocktail with vodka, vanilla and mango – is just as good as any drink from a Sanlitun bar where the highly trained, bowtie-wearing bartenders spend 15 minutes mixing your drink. But at RMB75, it’s cheaper.
And one last thing: we swear we’re not just saying all this because we’re journalists, and the drinks are named after writers and magazines. But if you’re reading this, Issey, it definitely helped.
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