While bar-hopping in Buenos Aires several years ago, I sipped a cocktail featuring a delicious Argentinian herbal liqueur.
I searched for it in vain until a bottle shop owner dusted off a cheap bottle of Legui, saying, “But you don’t want this. This is a grandpa drink.” My excited response was, “Do you have a whole section for grandpa drinks in this store?”
He gave me the side-eye back then, but today, so-called grandpa spirits are right at home behind hot bars worldwide — especially in Asia, where a seasoned wave of bar-preneurs is returning to their cultures’ authentic grassroots. Ingenious drinks exclusively made with local, regional, and national spirits are on the menu from China to South Korea and Taiwan to Japan. There are also a few sprinkled across Europe. It sounds like a natural concept, but I think it would be the equivalent of a U.S. bar focusing only on heritage styles of bourbon and American rye, perhaps with a splash of old-timey products like Laird’s apple brandy and Peychaud’s bitters.
Sipping a Kowloon Dairy cocktail at the new Hong Kong bar, Kinsman brings this movement to life on the palate. A thick layer of salted cream tops a delicate mix of clarified roselle, magnolia liqueurs, and monk fruit spirit. The unique spin on trendy milk punch tastes perfect at this vintage-modern bar, which is immaculately designed like a Wes Anderson version of a traditional cha chaan teng Hong Kong diner crossed with a retro American soda fountain.
“It’s kind of like moving the scope of mixology and its influences, away from the traditional centers of London, Paris, New York — the West,” says founder Gavin Yeung of his approach to Cantonese drinks, made with local spirits and ingredients.
Kinsman opened last November. The bar’s native-only-spirit style dates back to 2017 when Mannifatura in Florence started pouring only Italian spirits. It was a terrific trend for those who love Amari and aperitivos, but bad news for tourists seeking margaritas. In 2019, Melbourne, Australia’s Bad Frankie, became that country’s first bar dedicated to only Aussie spirits. In 2021, Chef Dean Banks (who has his own Lunun Gin and MOND Vodka brands) took over the venerable Pompadour restaurant in Edinburgh and created a Scottish-spirits-only bar there.
In Asia today, a flight of national-spirits-focused bars light up Asia’s Best list: Zest in Seoul (#2), Native in Singapore (#31) plus OUL at the Four Seasons Seoul and Chán Shífang in Tapei all concentrate on homegrown drinks and ingredients. Others, like Bar Cham in Seoul (set in a local hanok cottage) and Folklore in Tokyo (with a yen for sake and shochu), embrace local flavors and international elements.
Kinsman: Hong Kong
In his own historic Hong Kong ’hood during the pandemic days of sticking close to home, Kinsman founder Yeung went on a self-guided mixology journey, discovering unfamiliar ‘dusty’ bottles, in mom-and-pop shops. “Whenever I bought a bottle, I was amazed by all the flavors. So I wondered why nobody else knew about these, you know?” Black glutinous rice or papaya wine and pork-fat-infused spirit were a few discoveries with some obscure labels and their contents remaining unchanged for generations — and he began playing with them in drinks.
After wowing seasoned bar colleagues with guest shifts at the likes of The Aubrey (the shochu-focused Hong Kong izakaya that’s #10 on Asia’s Best Bars), Yeung decided Cantonese-spirit cocktails could blow up, which led him to partner with the restaurant group Singular Concepts to launch Kinsman. Its warmly welcoming, wooden-doored spot was formerly a hip brewpub in the popular mid-levels bar district. Yeung says the location “reflects the evolution of the Hong Kong drinks conversation, in a way.”
SanYou: Shenzen, China
Nip across the border from Kinsman in Hong Kong into Shenzhen to discover a similar deep-dive into Chinese spirits and ingredients at SanYou. Andrew Ho, co-founder of Hope Group (which runs another SanYou in Guangzhou, where the #19 Asia’s Best Bar 2024, Hope & Sesame, is also located), says that almost a decade into running bars, he and his colleagues were on a “quest to be more authentic.” The world might have enough Prohibition-style, classic cocktail speakeasies and drinks made from craft gins, they decided. Again, the pandemic was a golden opportunity to look inward: “[China] is a massive country, and we thought we should try to look more to that,” Ho says.
SanYou (the name’s individual hanji characters combine to mean “alcohol”) celebrates ancient Chinese drinking culture, including baiju and beyond. “We went on these little adventures [around China] to find really cool products from local producers, who have been making them for generations, Ho says.” Typically, such niche products weren’t widely known or distributed outside their autonomous regions. Then, the Hope Group looked to each region’s food traditions, from fish sauce to fruit and tea variations, to flesh out a menu of cocktails and snacks with uniquely Chinese flavors.
Meanwhile, Hope & Sesame locations are international and embrace the latest spirits and molecular mixology techniques. “SanYou is about storytelling and having really whimsical presentations,” Ho says, using 100 percent Chinese spirits and ingredients. “We need to get young people in. We want to be the bridge for them to the culture. We want Chinese people to be proud,” Ho says.
Does the native-spirits-only bar trend have long legs? Growing concern around local food security and global supply chains, plus a desire to step outside the massive consolidation of the liquor industry to find smaller suppliers, all feed into the trend of intensely local mixology.
SanYo’s Ho believes, “We could easily open 20 SanYous across different [Chinese] cities.” Yeung’s tagline for Kinsman in Hong Kong is “A Cantonese cocktail salon for past and future.” That future might taste like pork-fat-washed rice spirit or okra liqueur — like nothing you’ve ever sipped.
Charlene Rooke is a Vancouver-based drinks journalist, consultant and educator. She is a WSET Spirits Educator to Level 3 and WSET Certified in Wine, an SWE Certified Specialist of Spirits, an SMWS Scotch educator and an artisan distiller trained at Moonshine University in Louisville, KY. Charlene is a judge of the Canadian Artisan Spirits Competition and an expert on B.C. spirits who also leads distillery tours and guides spirits tastings. A former editor at The Globe and Mail, of Western Living and of Air Canada’s enRoute, and a former creative lead at three content agencies, she is currently the Drinks Editor for Food & Drink, the in-store magazine of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.
