Bartender Shingo Gokan is a master storyteller, building bars like chapters in an ever-expanding anthology under his bar consulting company, SG Group.
His foundational narrative centers on the 77 Japanese diplomats of the Tokugawa shogunate who visited New York in 1860 and their imagined encounter with legendary bartender Jerry Thomas. This reverie became the concept behind The SG Club, which opened in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood as a living work of historical fiction in 2018.
In January 2024, Gokan partnered with Employees Only’s bartender, Steve Schneider, to launch Sip & Guzzle in New York — a bar that mirrors his own journey in the early 2000s from Tokyo to Manhattan, where he honed his craft at the renowned Angel's Share. In July 2024, he unveiled the eponymous Gokan in Hong Kong, which playfully extends his fictional narrative. "I started to imagine that one of those Japanese samurai, a guy called Gokan-san, got shipwrecked off the coast of Hong Kong on his way back to Japan," Gokan explains.
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