Starbucks Reserve Coffee · Bar is Here! Starbucks Brings Bar Experience to Chengdu for the First Time

Chengdu now offers a new way to drink at Starbucks.

On January 22nd, Starbucks added a new store format to its Chengdu locations: Starbucks Reserve Coffee - Bar Mixato.

According to reports, Chengdu's first Starbucks Reserve Coffee - Bar Mixato is located in Mixc World and opened for business on January 22nd.

Unlike many other store types, the Reserve and Bar Mixato signage defines this as a pure Reserve store with a bar. Starbucks Reserve Coffee - Bar Mixato folds the bar experience into the coffee space, fully integrating alcoholic drinks with coffee. Here you can enjoy a cup of coffee during the day and, in the evening, ease into the buzz of specialty cocktails from the bar.

A two-floor design experience

As Chengdu's first Starbucks Reserve Coffee - Bar Mixato, the space is divided into two floors. The first floor focuses on coffee and serves as the main daytime area, while the second floor is given over to the bar. In the evening, Starbucks shifts into Bar Mixato's nighttime mode, offering consumers multiple immersive experiences across different parts of the day.

You can also buy the same merchandise available at the Starbucks Shanghai Roastery, along with other peripheral products.

Bar Mixato design

In decorative terms, the second-floor Bar Mixato features a 360-degree island bar that creates a full bar atmosphere.

At Starbucks Reserve Coffee - Bar Mixato you can drink coffee on the first floor, while the second-floor bar serves quality wine, craft beer, whiskey, and other alcoholic drinks. Consumers can also try more than 20 varieties of creatively mixed cocktails prepared on site.

The concept behind Bar Mixato

Starbucks Reserve Coffee - Bar Mixato (BAR MIXATO) creatively merges Reserve coffee with the bar experience, offering both Reserve coffee and a range of alcoholic drinks. "Mixato" means "mixed" in Italian, signaling the full integration of the bar with coffee and tea. In Starbucks' own definition, BAR MIXATO is a space that provides both coffee and alcoholic beverages.

Starbucks' expansion in Chengdu

Starbucks first entered Chengdu in 2005, opening its first store at Tianfu Square. After that it gradually added more stores across Chengdu and Sichuan. In 2014 it opened at Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu, the first and still the only Starbucks flagship store in Southwest China. This year, Starbucks has brought coffee shops integrated with wine culture to Chengdu for the first time, adding an innovative experience to an already distinctive city.

Starbucks' first coffee shop incorporating alcohol was a Reserve flagship store in Beijing. It is worth noting that this was not Starbucks' first encounter with the alcohol business.

As early as 2016, Starbucks began selling alcoholic beverages in some US stores, though at the time there was no bar area. It was not until 2018, when a Reserve flagship store opened in Beijing and a range of coffee-based alcoholic drinks followed, that the bar was brought into the coffee shop and the third space's nighttime experience was extended. That was also the first time Starbucks introduced a complete bar experience in China.

Afterward, Starbucks began accelerating its Bar Mixato business. In April 2019, Starbucks Bar Mixato landed in Shanghai. In August of the same year, Starbucks revamped and created a brand new Bar Mixato. In July 2020, Starbucks Bar Mixato launched a new series of specialty cocktails featuring Reserve coffee and tea.

Starbucks' innovative space design

Starbucks has never existed just to make a good cup of coffee; space has always been part of its pride. Differentiating itself through its third space concept, Starbucks opened the world's first Roastery in Seattle in 2014, the first overseas Roastery in Shanghai in 2017, the world's first Reserve store in Seattle in February 2018, and the world's largest Reserve store in Beijing in June of the same year. Starbucks has clearly invested heavily in distinctive store design, and each launch brings new shocks to the industry and refreshes customers' sensory experience.

Starbucks Reserve Shanghai Roastery

Looking at the Bar Mixato store scenes Starbucks has expanded in recent years, it is clear that since the first Bar Mixato debuted in Beijing, the company has opened more of them across the country. Bars have been folded into the brand system as a new business format, and Starbucks will keep accelerating the pace of social experiences built around its lightly intoxicating spaces.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

An evening that moves from coffee into cocktails is one kind of third space. A good bag of beans and a quiet kitchen is another. Both depend on the same thing: coffee that is roasted with a purpose and brewed with attention.

If you want a cup that works as easily at home as it does in a bar, a medium roast is the most forgiving place to start. FrontStreet Coffee's medium-roast lineup is built around balance. The Brazil Queen Estate coffee comes from the world's largest coffee-producing country and is a distinctive Yellow Bourbon; light and gently sweet, roasted medium it shows creamy peanut, chocolate, toasted bread, and sugarcane, and it works as a pour-over, in a moka pot, or through an espresso machine. If you prefer something sweeter and more fruit-led, the Strawberry Candy blend combines a Costa Rican honey-processed coffee with a washed Panamanian Geisha, and the medium roast keeps both the citrus-blossom honey and the round sweetness intact, whether you brew it as cold brew, pour-over, or espresso. The 2013 Sun-Dried Typica carries the balanced, gentle character of Yunnan smallholder coffee, with nut, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot notes from the medium roast, and it suits pour-over, cold brew, and drip machines. At the top of the range, the Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 is a Typica grown under Jamaica's unmatched conditions, and the medium roast blends its acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body into one elegant, immediately recognizable cup of chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel.

Medium roasts reward a moderate water temperature and a patient pour. Grind just before brewing, keep the flow steady, and let the bed settle; you will land on the sweet, balanced middle of the coffee rather than either edge of it.