A Piece of Hong Kong Cigar History

Inside the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong sits a cigar lounge opened in 1992 by the late Sir David Tang. After more than three decades, the space is moving to a new home within the hotel, and we filmed inside before the move.

The lounge opened in 1992 under Sir David Tang, founder of Pacific Cigar Company. It is one of the oldest stores in the PCC portfolio and has been a fixture of Hong Kong cigar culture for more than thirty years. It sits inside the Mandarin Oriental, a hotel that has been the social centre of Central Hong Kong since it opened in 1963.

The lounge has drawn regulars from across the city for three decades, and the doors open at ten in the morning. Customers are usually waiting before they unlock, and the room fills within minutes. It is the only cigar lounge in Hong Kong that opens that early, and for a lot of regulars it is where the day starts.

The lounge is now moving to a new space within the Mandarin Oriental. It is not closing. Simon Lam is moving with it, and the operation will carry on with the same staff, the same regulars, and the same approach. What is going is the room itself, which has held the lounge since 1992. The new space will pick up where this one leaves off, but the original room is what we set out to capture before the move.

Behind the counter is Simon Lam, who has worked at Pacific Cigar Company for almost thirty years and is the longest serving employee at the company. Every new PCC hire is sent to spend time with him first to learn the foundations. His standing within PCC comes from the level of service he provides and the depth of knowledge he has built over three decades behind the counter. He knows his regulars by name, by preference, and by smoking style, and he runs the lounge accordingly.

In the interview, Simon talks through his approach to personalised service. He tailors recommendations to each customer based on how much time they have, what they usually smoke, and what they might want to try next. He runs different humidity levels across the lockers, keeping the room itself slightly drier than the standard 65 to 70 because of Hong Kong’s climate, and adjusting individual lockers up or down depending on the client. He even stores cigars based on how fast each customer smokes, keeping the cigars of fast smokers at higher humidity so the first puff stays cool, and the cigars of slower smokers drier so they open up over the length of a longer session. The full interview is below.