Here’s a bartender who can really shake it doing some crazy tricks with his weapons of choice at LAN Club in Beijing. This was where I tippled on a sample of mixologist’s Mao’s summer cocktails while bonding with the super fabulous PR guy about the crappy gay expat scene in China. No matter where I go, it seems, my fag hag abilities are never wasted.
I was actually there on work. My goal: to pick a cocktail as City Weekend Beijing’s drink pick. Here’s the triage of drinks I sampled: a cool cucumber concoction, a cosmopolitan reimagined in raspberry, and my favorite – a killer kiwi number made with a fresh, macerated fruit.
They have a crazy, Philippe Starck-designed interior with all kinds of mismatched chairs, baroque frames, a bathroom fountain where a silver goose spits water onto your soiled hands, and other fantastic imaginings. I sampled my drinks sitting in a giant, red velvet throne with a golden eagle sculpture the size of an 8 year old perched on it, no joke.
Here’s the writeup I eventually sent in, I don’t know what the published version looked like since I headed back for America the next day:
There’s nothing quite like the magic touch of a good bartender. As easy as giving two parts hard liquor and one part tasty mixer a stir sounds, sometimes we need someone like LAN Club‘s Mao, master mixologist. He produces marvels like their kiwi martini (YY70), where he’s taken a whole kiwifruit and mashed it into a fine, lime green pulp, then fortified it with premium vodka, kiwi liqueur, lime juice, and flavored sugar. The result elevates a somewhat belittled, misunderstood fruit into a whole greater than the sum of its parts – and has us swooning over a simple tipple. We love most of all how there’s a bit of pulp just to make it, you know, more real. “I never taste,” Mao declares of his creations. “I don’t need to.” You can snag it for half price on Thursdays, 9pm-2am, or get two for YY70 on their Wednesday martini nights.
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