It’s that time again — The Dot Magazine is back in the capital with the lowdown on the year’s latest hottest openings. This time we’re serving up a real medley: a major relocation for one of our old favorites, candlelit elegance at the Fairmont hotel, old-meets-new izakaya vibes, and new bar blueprints from both established and up-and-coming faces.
That’s right. In our latest guide to what’s new in Hanoi, we’re taking in premium grooming, mixology, and fusion dining from both ends of the career spectrum: legends and rising stars.
From gentlemen’s houses to cocktail labs, fresh flavors keep showing up in Hanoi, and we’ve got everything you need to make the most of a long boozy day or a weekend of jumping around town. House of Barbaard has you covered from morning onwards at their epic space, whether you’re grooming or just enjoying a proper drink. Then Silver Fox waits to pour you their locally inspired ideas before or after a classy sundown session at the Fairmont’s YY Bar. When hunger sets in, ROJI21 is ready with Japanese fusion in an intimate setting. Finally — hot off the press — USE Bar’s Lucci Nguyễn has your nightcap sorted at his experimental venture, Bar Curio.
Read on for the inside story.
Bar Curio
Award-winning mixologist Lucci Nguyễn is back with his follow-up to USE Bar, a modern lab built around experimentation and featuring three distinct spaces.
The Lab serves up Vietnamese ingredients reworked through modern techniques, isolating every aroma, taste, and texture before reconstruction. As the resident mad scientists put it, this means “preserving an element’s sensory DNA in a new form.”
If you’re after something a little more international, the Main Bar is your outward-looking stop. Spirits and spices from other cultures, gathered through collabs, guest shifts, and travel, are channeled through a distinctly Hanoian sensibility. Curry powders, masala blends, and other flavors from abroad all make their way into the mix.
Then there’s the Self-Mix Station, where guests can embrace the inquiring ethos and build a drink from scratch. No fixed lists here, just a spirit, flavor, or rough idea — and a team ready to help turn it into something worth sipping.
Outside, “Curio” is spelled out in loose gold script above a panel of warm amber glass, hinting at what’s to come. Inside, the design follows the lab premise, from the white coats the bartenders wear and the distillation glassware they use to the apothecary bottles lining the shelves and specimen display cases adorning the bar.
Everything gleams, immaculate rather than clinical. The ceiling, with its dramatic dark oval form and illuminated central portal, draws the eye into a room full of inventive details, from planted terrariums built into the columns to loose arrangements of driftwood and moss on the counters.
The menu is deliberately open-ended, evolving as new components, partnerships, and cultural references flow in. In Lucci’s words, “Curio begins with curiosity. About a place. An ingredient. A familiar taste. And the question of what else it could become.”
What: Part cocktail bar, part science experiment.
Where: 8 Tràng Thi, Hoàn Kiếm
When: Mon–Thu 6pm–1am, Fri–Sun 6pm–2am
How: Instagram
YY Bar
YY was never meant to be just another hotel bar.
The premise was a space that expressed Vietnamese culture through cocktails, design, and music, while retaining a contemporary, international feel. Fairmont Hanoi is home to eight venues, and where 8 Saville Row trades in secrecy and Tran Dynasty leans on Luke Nguyen’s culinary storytelling, YY takes on a different role altogether — it’s the hotel’s social stage after dark. On the guest experience, Sebastian Buitrago Galvis, who leads the bar program under Fairmont’s wider team, is clear: “This was never intended to be only be your average cocktail bar.”
A mural of mandarin ducks, long associated with loyalty and connection across East Asia, welcomes guests into the bar. Far from simply decorative, it’s central to YY’s identity. Even the name plays on the term for a pair (‘Uyên Ương’).
The interior draws on nature too, from the stillness of water to the depth of a forest, fluid curves and nocturnal colors. Yet it’s the mandarin duck’s natural coloring — deep greens, blues, warm orange, cream and burgundy — that truly shapes the room’s visual language. And the birds stand for the idea at the heart of it all: “people coming together as the city moves into the night.”
The way night builds is a central theme at the bar. An evening here begins quietly around dusk, but hours later the room can feel completely different — louder conversations, the band alive, another round always on the way. The team describes the feeling this way, “Suddenly you realize you have been here much longer than you planned. That transformation is really YY.”
Wednesday through Saturday, resident artist Bella Forté becomes part of the room’s rhythm, hosting ‘YY Live Nights’. Her repertoire segues through funk, soul, Motown, and R&B, yet the sounds are sophisticated and restrained enough that conversation still comes easy. A deliberate quiet period before the 8pm opening set lets guests order and settle in before the vibe shifts.
For those who want to build their evening around the performances, dedicated dining and drinks packages are on offer. Beyond that, it comes down to which version of the bar you’re after: “Friday or Saturday for YY in full flight,” as they put it, or “Wednesday for YY up close.”
Whichever night you choose, try the Purple Perilla. The local flavor is built in, not garnished on top. There’s rum, calamansi, perilla juice, mint leaves, and ô mai (a Hanoi street-food staple of salted, sugared dried fruit). The ô mai carries the real weight — sour, salty, sweet, a burst of childhood nostalgia for many Vietnamese.
Behind it all is a simple concept: ‘nocturnal elegance’. It’s not about formality. It’s about a certain moment in the city that the team strives to capture — when the heat softens, lights reflect on streets, dinner winds down, and the pace shifts without necessarily slowing.
They’re not chasing luxury that leaves no mark. They want you to remember something specific, whether it’s a song, an unexpected flavor, or simply realizing you came for one drink and left after three. “The best compliment for us would probably be somebody leaving YY feeling that the night isn’t quite finished yet.”
What: Fairmont offers Hanoi a special social stage after dark.
Where: Level 2, Fairmont Hanoi, 10 Trần Nguyên Hãn, Hoàn Kiếm
When: Sun–Thu 5pm–12am, Fri–Sat 5pm–2am
How: Instagram | Facebook
House of Barbaard
Guido de Leeuw and Tom Goedhart made a big move in May, swapping their Meliá hotel base for Level 8, a standalone floor at Tiến Bộ Plaza. Since opening their first Hanoi barbershop back in 2017, the Dutch duo – who we first discovered at their Saigon shops off Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai street and at the Sofitel Saigon Plaza – have kept expanding.
And they’re calling this sprawling Hanoi home their “most complete expression of the House” yet.
They always believed Vietnam was ready for a different kind of grooming experience, one where the ritual mattered as much as the haircut itself. They were fascinated by the old-school barbershop as a social hub: a place where men swapped stories, shared a drink, and kicked back. And that’s exactly what started happening.
Guests arrived early for their haircut, and left long after. “We were building a house,” they realized. The lounge bar was never an afterthought. The goal was to ensure the barbershop and bar never felt separate.
Now, for Guido and Tom, Tiến Bộ isn’t just a new address; it’s a stake in Hanoi Centre’s fast-growing future, and a chance to help shape the city while keeping the Barbaard heritage intact. Everything classic — whisky, cigars, exclusive hospitality — now exists in lighter, more open surroundings. A perfect example is the balcony, where you can step out mid-haircut and look over Hanoi as day turns to evening.
Yet the space isn’t meant to reveal all its treasures at once. The pair capture that idea through the vault theme, which they consider the perfect metaphor for what’s on offer: protective, solid, and secretive from the outside, with the real value always inside.
Here, that’s not bottles or equipment. It’s the experience itself.
The bar sits at the center of it all, though the barbershop remains visually prominent, with serious chairs and serious craftsmen, never just decoration. Beyond it, the lounge areas offer somewhere more relaxed to linger or meet informally.
Private rooms are available for dinner, a business meeting, opening a special bottle — anything requiring a little more discretion. Cigars and food help dictate the pace. While cigars encourage guests to slow down and really talk, because “you can’t really rush a good cigar,” food means nobody has to cut a visit short out of hunger.
Darker tones and warm lighting set the mood, backed by metal, leather, and timber chosen to improve with age. It’s all built to reward a return visit. “We don’t want Level 8 to feel like a venue designed primarily for taking one photograph,” they say, “we want people to keep discovering details after their fifth or tenth visit.”
When pressed about the Dutch details in the design, Guido and Tom quickly reminded us of the name’s origins. ‘Barbaard’ splices ‘bar’ with ‘baard’, Dutch for beard. Another easter egg awaits inside the product display, where a pair of traditional Dutch wooden shoes sit tucked innocuously among the other objects. Like many of their home influences, we might not have noticed. “Most don’t,” they add. “And that’s probably exactly how we like it.”
What: Hanoi’s fullest expression of a gentleman’s house.
Where: 8th Floor, Tiến Bộ Plaza, 175 Nguyễn Thái Học, Ô Chợ Dừa
When: Tue–Sun 9am–1am
How: Instagram | Facebook
ROJI21
Tùng Nguyễn has come full circle. He started in F&B 12 years ago, and at 18, in a small izakaya on Kim Mã, his passion for the craft took root, and he began dreaming of opening his own place. ROJI21 is that dream.
Opened last November, ROJI21 sits on a French colonial-era street that’s quiet in the morning and becomes a social hub by night. A striking indigo-blue door marks the entrance, a deliberate choice to draw the eye, opening onto an interior of traditional wood textures against modern indigo tones.
Tùng almost named it ‘Ohadzô’ when the concept was still focused on straightforward drinking. But after stumbling across the building by chance, drawn in by its number 21 — which the team also reads as ‘two in one’ — and the street’s unassuming charm, a different idea took hold. ‘Roji’ is Japanese for alley, and it felt like the right name for a place where two cultures could naturally overlap.
That same idea shows up in the logo: a bia hơi mug clinking against a sake cup. This is where “Japanese izakaya spirit meets Vietnamese ‘nhậu’ culture.”
It plays out in the food, too. Bestsellers Bò Tươi Tắn (beef) and Tóp Mỡ Liên Trì (pork fat/cracklings) bring plenty of umami and spice, so Tùng suggests starting with a beer or highball. The second round is where the curated sake list comes in, and the staff is happy to recommend the right pour for each dish. Their all-time favorite? Bò Tươi Tắn with Kubota Senju Ginjo, a pairing they swear by. Check out ‘Men & Mồi’ on their Instagram for more ideas.
Getting regulars to try something unfamiliar is a challenge in itself, one ROJI tackles through ‘Mỗi ly một chuyện’ (‘Each glass, its own story’), a series where staff talk through the ideas behind specific drinks. One episode explores the Matcha Highball, their most curiosity-inducing drink and a neat emblem of the philosophy: the team had to step outside its comfort zone before asking guests to do the same. There’s no pressure to learn or be ‘educated’ — just explore at your own pace.
Formalities are also out the window, as they lean into the idea that feeding someone is a love language in Vietnam. Tùng and his team want things to feel spontaneous yet familiar, and for people to leave with a sense of belonging. In their words, “That is how a night out starts to feel like coming home.”
What: Where two cultures nhậu together.
Where: 21 Liên Trì, Hoàn Kiếm
When: Tue–Sat 11am–2:30pm, daily 6pm–late
How: Instagram | Facebook
Silver Fox
How far could a modern cocktail bar go in telling the story of the city itself? That’s the question a team of bartenders and bar-industry veterans set out to answer with Silver Fox. The goal was a space where they could “have a conversation with Hanoi.”
They’ve always observed the capital as a place where a French colonial facade, a traditional tube house, and a decades-old tea shop can share one street. Silver Fox is just one more addition. Cocktails are the language here, something modern and always evolving, built on a foundation of balance, craftsmanship, and hospitality.
Watch a bartender here, and you’ll see contrast in motion. One moment, highly contemporary technique; the next, a classic Old Fashioned stirred or a Daiquiri shaken. The bar counter is the heart of the space, with spirits, bitters, cordials, and all the tools of the trade laid out in view. As they put it, “classic without being nostalgic, contemporary without feeling unfamiliar.” That same spirit runs through the materials too, with Old Quarter colors and architectural lines worked into a distinctly modern setting.
That old Hanoi thread runs through the cocktails, framed as chapters of a river’s path through the city. As they explained, the aim was never “to simply use ingredients from Hanoi to create a ‘Vietnamese cocktail.’” It was all about how flavor can tell a story. The collection runs five drinks deep: Thượng Nguồn (The Source), Hợp Lưu (Confluence), Long Mạch (Dragon Vein), Phù Sa (Alluvial), and Sương Tây Hồ (West Lake Mist). Phù Sa is what they’d pour for an old friend — sediment as memory. The drink draws on the Red River itself, the reddish-brown water that has nourished farmland and communities for generations, and renders it in nutty, toasted flavors and a warm depth. For all the storytelling, they insist every drink still has to be good enough to make you want another sip.
Silver Fox took over a location with a story already attached: for six years the space was home to The Black Sheep Cocktail Theatre, and two of its former bartenders, Hoàng Dây and Dương Trần, were on hand for the soft opening. The current team frames its work as both a tribute and continuation: “The address remains the same, but the story keeps moving.”
The name, though, is where things diverge. Where The Black Sheep stood apart from the crowd, rebellious and unconventional, Silver Fox feels calm, mature, refined. ‘Silver’ does real work here, something closer to light reflecting on water than anything bright or attention-seeking, a detail that ties directly to the river concept running throughout.
Their own invitation captures the spirit of the place: “Come by Silver Fox, order a drink, sit down, and see where the next current takes us. The next chapter is already flowing.”
What: Hanoi’s story, one cocktail at a time
Where: 28 Tống Duy Tân, Hoàn Kiếm
When: Daily 3pm–2am
How: Instagram | Facebook
