The High Art Of Taste

For Andrei Makarevich, bar manager of Zuma Hong Kong, the road to upper-echelon flavours is paved with experience, rigour, and discernment.

- WORDS INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

I HAVE NOT BEEN to Zuma Hong Kong yet, but I know excellent hands steer its bar. My confidence is born from one incontestable fact. Upon meeting me, the captain Andrei Makarevich presented me with his take on my favourite cocktail, the Paloma, and it was exquisite. Months removed from that balmy Friday afternoon, I still miss it.

Belarus-born and world-destined, Makarevich is a living repository of ways to uplift a cocktail-savouring experience. He is nothing short of pleasure centre-swooning bliss. But his powers are hard earned. From his early days in Ukraine and Moscow to stints in Zuma Abu Dhabi and a tenure in New York, the socially accepted birthplace of the cocktail, to his current helm at Zuma Hong Kong, he has been on a journey of discovery marked as much by its fruit as by the life-and-craft-defining toil it took to taste them.

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