So today marks a leap year meaning we get that rarest of experiences – February the 29^th. This may not seem hugely exciting. However, back in the 1920s, when Harry Craddock was mixing cocktails at the Savoy, leap year celebrations were quite the thing. Harry Craddock even created the Leap Year Cocktail to mark the 1928 celebrations at the Savoy. The Leap Year Cocktail isn’t a bad drink either, being sort of a lightweight cousin to the Burnt Fuselage.

The Burnt Fuselage (which I found here at the Cocktail Chronicles) became a minor hit in Shanghai after I introduced the recipe to the now disappeared Senses Wine Lounge. Senses was stocking a good mixing cognac, had some customers who appreciated cognac in mixed drinks, and the drink took off. The drink spread from Senses to a few other bars, and I started getting late night texts from strangers asking me to confirm the recipe for them. Even more amazingly the drink continued to be made consistently to the original recipe for weeks on end. This consistency was something of a first.

Chinese barmen are not the world’s greatest. There are a few different things at work here. First, there is the Chinese trait called ‘cha-bu-duo-ism’ (or 差不多-ism). ‘Cha-bu-duo’ means something like ‘just about’ or ‘nearly right’ in Chinese, and describes the way most things are done there. If a barman finds himself without rum he’ll make a Pina Colada with gin. In fact even if he does have rum he may still absent mindedly make it with gin. Second, there is the Chinese habit of protecting ones interests by keeping knowledge to oneself. This works well if you are a character in a martial arts epic, lending itself to grand finales hinging on secret and powerful fighting techniques. Unfortunately the same habit becomes frustrating when barmen adopt it. A barman who learns anything tends to jealously keep that knowledge to themselves. If asked to pass the knowledge on to co-workers they may even deliberately mislead their hapless student. Chaos ensues. Third, there is just a simple lack of basic knowledge of how to make drinks in China. This means barmen have real trouble retaining complicated recipes, making simple mixtures comprising equal proportions of three ingredients a godsend. Lets also admit that these equal parts recipes are easy for inebriated drinkers to remember too.

So the Burnt Fuselage is made as follows:

1 oz cognac

1 oz Grand Marnier

1 oz Dry Vermouth

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist, being sure to express the oils into the drink.

Simple, rich, complex and delicious.

The Leap Year is a lighter cousin to the Burnt Fuselage, and is made as follows:

2 oz gin

½ oz Grand Marnier

½ oz Sweet Vermouth

dash of lemon juice (my dash was a teaspoon or so)

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

This lacks the powerful and complex body of the Burnt Fuselage. It is much lighter, less sweet, and leans more towards refreshing than contemplative. The Burnt Fuselage seems more like an after dinner or late evening drink. The Leap Year is probably more at home in the early evening. Not a classic, but also not bad. Why not mark the 80th birthday of this drink by mixing one up? Oh, and according to Harry Craddock this drink was responsible for more proposals than any other cocktail ever invented. The tradition of women being allowed to propose to men on a leap year must have been very real back in the 1920s. Some men may wish to closely guard the formula.

The one bar where I have drunk a Charlie Chaplin was a little Japanese place in Shanghai. This time the bar in question was not Constellation, but rather the little bar inside the Garcon Chinois restaurant on Hengshan Rd. That bar is much smaller than Constellation, and does not have nearly the same range of spirits, but the cocktails used to be very carefully and expertly made by a Japanese woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

She looked nothing like a bartender. In my experience bartenders are almost never Japanese women with greying hair and the homely dress sense of a church goer. Walking into her bar was like visiting a Japanese aunt you had only recently discovered you had. Things would begin with a friendly but slightly distanced greeting – understandable given that the pair of you had only just found out about each other. Then she would get busy behind the tiny bar. Were it not for the bottles piling up around her hands you would assume her meticulous and busily leisured movements were eventually going to produce a small batch of dumplings, or perhaps a plate of cold tofu sprinkled with chives and sesame oil. Instead, after the type of interval that builds anticipation without seeing it collapse into distraction, you would be presented with an excellent and carefully measured cocktail. It was slightly incongruous, but the results were very competent. Unfortunately I heard she has since left.

When I asked for a Charlie Chaplin she warned me that they didn’t have Gordons sloe gin (for which they relied on customers carrying bottles from Japan). She offered to substitute Bols while complaining about its bad quality and saying the taste would be too artificial. Warming to her theme she was soon lamenting that even single malts were often artificially flavored these days. I am not so sure if that is true. Regardless of that though, it is not often a bar cares enough about getting their drinks perfect that they will warn their customers before using what they feel are inferior ingredients. I had the Charlie Chaplin anyway and even with the Bols it tasted OK.

I made my own Charlie Chaplin as follows:

2 oz apricot brandy (I used Marie Brizard)

1 oz sloe gin (I used Gordons)

1 oz lime juice

Shake over ice and strain into a highball glass. The drink isn’t going to fill the glass without something extra, so consider pouring onto a couple of large rocks.

You would think that a drink comprising three parts liqueur and one part citrus juice would be extremely sweet. It is sweet, but less so than you’d expect. The slight sourness in the sloe gin boosts the lime, pushing the drink more towards fruity acidity than complete sugar bomb territory. Something about the lime and sloe gin helps the apricot brandy come across more as a fresh apricot flavor than a cloying liqueur. There is an interesting hint of almond flavor in the background as well, almost like an amaretto sour. This may not be the most exciting drink in history but it makes a nice showcase for apricot brandy, and is refreshing and neither too strong not too sweet. This is a drink that deserves to be made a little more often. The sweet and sour flavor profile also fits well with modern tastes, while the sloe gin and apricot brandy introduce a couple of ingredients not often called for in modern bars. Obviously apricot brandy is going to dominate the taste so try to use the best you can find.

Looking at the recipe I couldn’t help wondering whether it dry apricot brandy hadn’t been intended. My natural inclination to use eau de vie at every opportunity was probably at work here – I just love the stuff. So I made up another drink with an apricot eau de vie. Coincidentally I was watching a Buster Keaton movie at the time, so naturally I dubbed the new drink (if indeed it is a new drink) the Buster Keaton.

Buster Keaton

2 oz apricot eau de vie (Barrak Palinka)

1 oz sloe gin (Gordons)

1 oz lime juice

Hmm. . . This really wasn’t particularly good. In fact it seems a shame to attach the venerable name Buster Keaton to such a bad drink. I find relatively few experiences involving alcohol to actually be unpleasant, but this one ventures into dubious territory. The dry apricot brandy and lime are amicable enough companions. The sloe gin is very out of place though, and there isn’t much sugar around to smooth the rough edges. The drink is thin bodied, sour, and arguably more alcoholic than necessary – not unlike myself. You can certainly gag it down but is unlikely to be an experience you’d want to repeat. Sorry Mr. Keaton.

Well that wasn’t very pleasant but at least I think I have learned something. The Charlie Chaplin is definitely supposed to be made with a sweet apricot brandy, so get the best one you can and give it a try.

Today’s Mixology Monday, hosted at Martini Lounge is all about shooters. Shooters are really not my thing. Designing a shooter seems more about finding an amusing name than about creating a tasty drink. Maybe they have a place though. The Austrian barman at a little place I sometimes visit here in Shanghai has a habit of mixing his favorite customers a quick ‘shot’ as they leave. He usually mixes up rum, lime, and something sweet, and the quantity is probably something less than a full drink. It can make a friendly and pleasant end to the evening.

Generally though I just don’t like shooters so I had trouble thinking of anything for this Mixology Monday. But perhaps Pink Gin could be considered a shooter? I was very skeptical about Pink Gin the first time I tried it so I think I either made it on a shot glass or made a very small quantity in a rocks glass. Actually it isn’t so bad. It isn’t something I ever really drink, but there is something quite nice about room temperature gin with bitters. If you really and truly enjoy gin then you should also enjoy it at room temperature, right? So why not try a shot of Pink Gin?

Simply put a couple of dashes of bitters into the glass, tilt the glass to distribute it evenly, then add the gin. If you enjoy the taste then slowly savor it rather than tossing it back. If you don’t like the taste then toss it back and go make something else.

A few weeks back I found a shop here in Shanghai selling Marie Brizard liqueurs. There seems to be a company importing them from Hong Kong into Shantou. Unfortunately the Shanghai store has decided to stop stocking them in favor of Bols. It is hard to understand why they would do this given that Bols is generally crappy and Marie Brizard is generally good, but there you go.

Anyway, having realized Marie Brizard was quality stuff after trying their Apry while in Cambodia I grabbed a few more flavors as soon as I saw it. I picked up crème de cacao, orange curacao and anisette. I also grabbed a bottle of Get 31 peppermint liqueur. I was especially pleased with the anisette because I hadn’t seen this before in Shanghai.

All of the flavors were pretty good when I compared them to Bols. The only slightly strange one was the crème de cacao, which seems to have an odd herbal taste in addition to the chocolate. The Get 31 tasted OK but had a strange sediment in the bottle. I took it back a few days later and exchanged it. Exchanging it was a little funny. I was standing in the front of the shop showing the assistant that my bottle had a sediment while the other bottles did not. There were three of us standing in a line behind the display holding bottles of crème de menthe up to the light and peering into them. A dozen or so pedestrians on Huaihai Rd. stopped to watch the foreigner checking the crème de menthe bottles. I guess they thought they were seeing a crème de menthe inspector from France doing a random crème de menthe inspection.

Later that night I happened to take out the Anisette bottle to show a friend while we were having a drink in Le Garcon Chinois. The Japanese woman behind the bar seemed to have some kind of a sixth sense for anisette. As soon as the bottle came out of its bag she abandoned the drinks she was making at the other end of the bar to ask where I had found anisette in Shanghai. She said she needed it to make a drink called Shanghai. I’d never heard of this drink before, but after she mentioned it to me I did notice that the odd bar in Shanghai has it on their menu, always made with Pernod since anisette is hard to find. Anyway, I eventually got around to making a Shanghai myself.

Shanghai

1 1/2 oz Jamacian rum

1/2 oz lemon juice

1/4 oz anisette

1/4 oz grenadine

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

There seems something old fashioned about sweetish but extremely rummy drinks like this one. The anisette adds interest to what is really just a very simple rum punch, and takes it away from being just a sweet and sour type of drink. It is good if you want a very mild aniseed drink.

This month’s Mixology Monday, kindly hosted at Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour, is all about whiskey. Note, simply whiskey, not necessarily whiskey cocktails. I should have lots to say about this month’s topic but somehow I don’t.

Of course there are many things I could cover. I could choose a favorite whiskey cocktail and write about that. I could write about my family’s ritual of drinking tea with whiskey in the morning on Christmas Day. I could write about a favorite whiskey, maybe Lagavulin or Laphroaig.

Of those two I probably prefer Laphroaig – particularly the cask strength Laphroaig. The thing about Laphroaig is that while drinking it you can never quite decide what to make of it. Laphroaig lacks the easy appeal of Lagavulin. It is clearly a fine whiskey, but not quite a crowd pleaser. Each taste brings something that attracts you, but in the background lurks something hard to fathom, possibly even something a little rough and unpleasant. You quickly decide that Laphroaig is very nice but not quite perfect. The imperfection is where the attraction of Laphroaig lies though. Laphroaig is a little like a woman who has a beautiful face with an obvious flaw, and somehow it is the flaw that makes her looks. Without the flaw she would not be half so good looking because there would simply be nothing to think about, and thus no source of interest. Laphroaig challenges you to think. It has personality and is endlessly interesting. Its a whiskey you could happily grow old with.

Of course given that most people reading this are cocktail bloggers they have probably tried Laphroaig and Lagavullin already, and for people who haven’t tried them a verbal description is hardly sufficient. Maybe I should write something about a whiskey not popular in the west, maybe the Suntory Yamazaki 12 Year Old Single Malt from Japan.

It was drinking the Suntory Yamazaki in Constellation, a little Japanese bar in Shanghai, that got me seriously interested in cocktails. The barman, Mr. Jin, suggested I try a Suntory Yamazaki with water and ice. This way of drinking whiskey is known as ‘mizuwari’ in Japan. I was brought up to think that good whiskey was best unpolluted by anything. I was not keen on Mr. Jin’s proposal. He was persistent though, and further proposed making two glasses using identical ingredients. One would be mixed to taste good, and the other would be mixed to taste average. He would let me taste both, then give me the good one and drink the average one himself. Intrigued, I let him do his thing.

He filled both glasses with freshly chipped ice. In traditional Japanese bars the barman works with an ice pick to produce individualized ice for each drink. They will carve a single snowball sized rock for a scotch on the rocks, smaller shards for highball type drinks, and so on. All this is done with ice so cold it is dry to the touch. It is a world away from the soggy machine ice you find in most bars. When I take people to Constellation they are amazed at how long the ice cubes take to melt. After filling the glasses with ice Mr. Jin began stirring one glass with spoon, thoroughly chilling the glass. He poured the melt out of that glass and added more ice before adding whiskey to both glasses, thoroughly stirring the first glass and giving the second a perfunctory stir, adding a little more ice to both glasses and finally topping them up with water.

The taste difference between the two drinks was enormous, and the thoroughly chilled one was very good. That drink totally changed my ideas about Japanese whiskey, and about drinking whiskey with water. These days I think that whiskey needs a few drops of water to bring out the full flavor. The Japanese whiskeys that are designed to be drunk mizuwari style taste good with an even bigger dose of water.

Hmm. . . having written a couple of paragraphs I am still not convinced there is anything I can say that a glass of whiskey couldn’t say much better. But continuing with the Japanese theme, the novelist Haruki Murakami wrote an interesting little travel book about a trip around the distilleries of Islay and Ireland. The book is called “If Our Language was Whiskey”. At least I assume that’s what it’s called. The name in Chinese is “如果我们的语言是威士忌”. If our language was whiskey. . . What a amazing world that would be. Imagine smiling people inhabiting a bottle green landscape. Some are gathered in fields where they appreciatively pass glasses back and forth. Others sit alone beside crystal springs and quietly savor. Proposing marriage is as simple as selecting just the right single malt and passing it across to the object of your affections. Everyone is content.

I suppose that just for Mixology Monday our language really is whiskey, so I will finish up with an appropriately named whiskey cocktail. Oddly enough for a whiskey cocktail this one was inspired by a potable bitters from Poland I picked up the other day. The brand is Balsam and the label says it is flavored with wolfberries, honey, and other unspecified herbs. This is a sweet bitters, something like Jagermeister but milder. Perhaps it most closely resembles Averna from Italy.

Balsam makes a nice sour but I thought I would try and make a whiskey drink from it. I did an experiment with some scotch but it didn’t work very well. The honey notes meant the drink ended up tasting like a Rusty Nail but without the easy mixability and balance provided by Drambuie. I decided to try adding some vermouth and mixing it with Jameson Irish whiskey. I figured the Jameson would mix better with the Balsam than scotch and produce something less sweet than if using bourbon.

If Our Language Was Whiskey

1 oz Jameson

1 oz French vermouth

1 oz Balsam (substitute Averna, or maybe a reduced quantity of Jagermeister)

1 dash Angostura bitters

1/2-1 tsp Benedictine

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Squeeze the oils from a lemon twist onto the drink and rub the twist around the rim of the glass.

The astringent Jameson helps balance out the Balsam but the herbal flavors are still there. I added a little Benedictine as an afterthought. It complements the herbals in the Balsam but also adds complexity and helps everything mesh together.

I may play around with the recipe some more in future. Right now I am wondering whether an idea as weird as using Laphroaig as a modifier could work. Maybe I will remove the Benedictine and add a splash of Laphroaig, or mix the drink with Laphroaig instead of Jamesons. Mixing Laphroaig with Jamesons would be cool if it worked since Haruki Murakami visited both Islay and Ireland on his trip.

Update: I tried making the drink as above but with two teaspoons of Laphroaig. It was pretty good, probably more interesting than the original version. You notice the Laphroaig more on the initial taste than on the after taste. This could be worth continuing to play around with. Perhaps it could use a different bitters though, or the Balsam could be reduced. The Balsam isn’t bad, but there is something almost too smooth and mundane about it.

I dropped into Trader Vic’s recently opened Shanghai restaurant last night for a Shanghai Expat (www.shanghaiexpat.com) hosted cocktail party. The service at Trader Vics is five star, the Polynesian décor takes you a world away from the grime and grind of Shanghai, and the food and drinks are not half bad. However, you can’t help thinking the cocktails could be better. The drinks are by no means bad, but when patronizing the joint that invented the Mai Tai it is depressing to drink a Mai Tai that is merely a shadow of what it could be.

Unlike most places, Trader Vic’s make Mai Tais more or less to the original Victor Bergaron recipe. That is, they don’t add any fruit juices other than lime, they use freshly squeezed juices, they use orgeat rather than almond liqueur, they don’t add strange liqueurs like apricot brandy, and their drink is a rum-focused sweet-and-sour drink rather than a confused tropical punch with no rum taste. In short, they make a pretty good Mai Tai. Sadly they don’t use good rum.

The other disappointing thing is that Trader Vics do not use what I would consider a good quality mint. The mint they use is the mild and herbaceous mint with soft leaves common around Shanghai. This mint doesn’t do a lot to the taste of a drink, or anything else for that matter. More intense mint with stiffer leaves is sometimes available in Shanghai, just a littler harder to find. I think the stuff with stiffer leaves is peppermint, and maybe that is not the ideal mint to use. In any case it seems better to me than mint with no real flavor.

The Mai Tai was originally concocted with Wray Nephew 17 year old Jamaican rum. As his chain of restaurants expanded and stocks of the Wray Nephew 17 year old became depleted and increasingly expensive, Victor Bergaron began using lesser rums. In particular he began mixing lesser Jamaican rums with the very dry Martinique rums to obtain a similar complexity to the original Wray Nephew product. Unfortunately in Trader Vic’s these days they use standard Meyer’s rum plus a house Mai Tai mix. I guess there is some aged rum in the Mai Tai mix, but in any case the result is underwhelming.

Anyway, after the Trader Vic’s experience last night I thought I’d make my own Mai Tai today. Since aged Jamaican is unavailable in Shanghai I used a mixture of aged Cuban rum and Martinique rum. I found Marie Brizard Orange Triple Sec the other day, so that was another reason for trying the drink again. Previously I’ve only been able to find cheap Bols triple sec or Cointreau. Cointreau is nice, but the taste and alcohol content may be a little too intense to make it a perfect triple sec substitute.

My Mai Tai

1 oz Havana Club 7 Anos

1 oz St. James Amber

1 oz fresh squeezed lime juice

1/2 oz Marie Brizard Orange Curacao

1/4 oz Monin Orgeat (Monin is quite intense so I reduced slightly from the 1/2 oz recommended in a lot of recipes)

1/4 oz simple sugar syrup

Shake over crushed ice and serve in a double rocks glass, putting one of the spent lime shells in the drink. Garnish with some nice quality mint if you have it. I didn’t have mint handy so used a pineapple spear with maraschino cherry.

The version makes a nice drink. The rum taste could be stronger, but the complexity is there. The nutty flavors of the Martinique rum go well with the orgeat. In the absence of a decent Jamaican rum Havana Club works OK. The citrus flavors seem far more of a background note using the Marie Brizard Curacao compared to Cointreau. I could be wrong though since it has been at least six months since I made this with Cointreau. If the drink has any weakness it could be that the Orgeat comes through a bit strong. Perhaps some more adjusting is in order.

Regular readers will remember that the queue jumping woman I encountered in early December said that the fact that I ‘had a big nose’ (i.e. was a westerner) gave me no right to tell her what to do. An everyday disagreement about queue jumping thus became a racial confrontation.

A week or so later a pimp grabbed me in Nanjing Road. Nanjing Road is a major shopping street, but the large numbers of tourists in the area mean there are also aggressive pimps who target single male foreigners. After he grabbed me I told him to get lost in English (‘fuck off’ to be accurate), he took offense and started to gather a crowd to support him. In his own words “Chinese law protects Chinese people! A foreigner cannot speak like that to a Chinese person in China! A foreigner in China has no rights because China belongs to Chinese people!” I called the police to see what would happen. Pimping is (surprise surprise) illegal in China, so it was difficult to understand his astonishment when ‘the law’, which after all exists “to protect Chinese people” took him down to the station while the foreigner was left free to continue on his way. Happily in this instance some of the crowd were quite supportive of me. I think some locals also get fed up with the numerous scam artists that make a nuisance of themselves on Nanjing Rd. It could have gone differently though had his two pimp friends, who were originally being quite threatening, not had the good sense to vanish after I made the phone call.

Then last Wednesday night I was crossing Nanjing Rd. at Xikang Rd. and ran into another incident. I had the green pedestrian light and a car was coming along Nanjing Rd. about to turn into Xikang Rd., and showing no signs of giving way to me. I decided to cross anyway. He was forced to choose between stopping and hitting me and decided to stop, but stuck his head out the window to call me a ‘sha bi’ (stupid cunt). I ask him what his problem is (I do have the right to cross the road on the pedestrian signal after all) and the conversation ran a predictably fruitless course. I was careful not to swear at him though and stuck to explaining traffic law. He made to get out of the car, and since he had four friends in there with him I decided to back off. He got out of the car anyway, and punched me in the head from behind as I walked away, screaming “How dare you disrespect a Chinese person in China!” along with other racist abuse. He landed a couple of ineffective punches before I grabbed his hand and held it. I wasn’t at all hurt and stayed perfectly calm. As he hit me he was screaming at passers by to support him in beating this ‘western (white) person’. Nobody seemed very interested in ‘beating the western (white) person’, but people were curious and a crowd gradually developed. I asked him if he was done, let go of his hand, called the police, and moved in front of his car to stop him from leaving.

The police quickly arrived and started asking questions. Despite the large crowd of people only one local was prepared to stand as a witness to the unprovoked assault on me. A passing foreigner also acted as a witness. We ended up down at the police station (just me and the five guys in the car), where proceedings were basically a waste of time. The police were relatively sympathetic but since they were not traffic police they did not want to get involved in the traffic incident side of things. Nor were they interested in charging him with assault. Instead they approached it as a matter best resolved by a mutual apology. The driver of the car lied and said I hit him first, as well as ‘swearing at him in English which he couldn’t understand’, thus provoking him to attack me. This was totally untrue but what can you do? I pointed out to the police that he was missing skin on his knuckles from hitting me while my hands were not the slightest bit red or bruised, but they weren’t interested in considering this as evidence. Maybe this was fair enough – I could have kicked him or something for all they knew. Eventually the police pressured him into apologizing (they took him into a side room, said something to him, and he came back and apologized). I wasn’t required to. Pre- and post- apology though he maintained the attitude of an arrogant and aggressive prick. Meanwhile the police were not all that helpful and carried on saying that as a foreigner I didn’t really ‘understand’ the situation. I asked them to explain to me the part of the situation I didn’t understand, or even just identify the aspect of affairs that was causing me difficulty. They either couldn’t or wouldn’t.

What was remarkable about all of this though? The remarkable feature was the discovery that in a confrontation with a foreigner, Chinese inevitably make the foreigner’s ‘foreignness’ somehow relevant, however irrelevant it may be in reality. One would think that a queue was a fairly simple concept. Chinese have no problems grasping what a queue is, how it works, and why it is desirable. However, the moment a foreigner tries to protect their place in a queue they are guilty of trying to bully Chinese people. Similarly, ordinary Chinese are ill disposed towards pimps who grab customers in busy shopping districts. However, the moment such a pimp gets called up for grabbing a foreign customer the pimp is likely to object on the grounds that the foreigner is insulting Chinese people. Finally, right of way on a pedestrian crossing seems like a simple enough affair until it is a foreigner trying to cross the road, in which case they may get beaten for disrespecting a Chinese driver. Even if the foreigner escapes without being attacked, threatened or insulted, they are likely to end up listening to a condescending explanation that the whole situation occurred because there is something about China that, as a foreigner, they simply don’t understand.

Of course there is nothing unique about these sorts of attitudes. A certain level of racism and xenophobia is probably part of human nature. China is unusual though in the prevalence of such attitudes. In most countries maybe just one in ten confrontations would inspire a xenophobic and racist reaction, while in China the ratio would be much higher, perhaps closer to nine out of ten.

A couple of nights ago I dropped into the recently opened Henry’s Brewpub in Shanghai. The beer there is US style. It is nothing like the English beer brewed at Galbraiths in Auckland, but it isn’t too bad. The prices are also reasonable, only 30 RMB a glass, compared to at least twice that for the Bavarian wheat beers at the Shanghai Paulaner.

My timing was excellent, for two reasons. First, I arrived to meet a friend at exactly 7 pm, and found that they were offering free beer for the next hour. Naturally I took advantage of this unexpected opportunity. Second, there was the most stunning looking Sri Lankan girl working behind the bar, on her first night in the place, and as it turned out probably her last.

The beer was very good. US style micro-brews aren’t exactly my thing, but there is no denying that the beer at Henrys is good. I had a pale ale, a honey brown ale, and then more of the pale ale. Me and my friend had a couple of plates of ribs, and he chatted about his messy personal life. I spent most of the conversation talking about the virtues of monogamy, something he needed a dose of. I was the very voice of temperance and self-control, a lone voice raging in defense of true love and straight dealing. While not deliberate there was something vaguely fortuitous about all this. Since the bar was virtually empty (Henry’s has only just opened and even free beer doesn’t seem to be pulling the crowds in just yet) the Sri Lankan barmaid was listening to most of our conversation. We must have sounded something like a good cop bad cop routine, but I was not just any good cop, I was the cop who was going to single handedly right every wrong in the world.

Eventually the barmaid joined in the conversation. We stopped talking about my friend’s situation and moved on to other things. It turned out that the barmaid was from Sweden. She had been born in Sri Lanka but adopted by a Swedish family. Naturally I asked her where I could find aquavit or Swedish punsch in Shanghai. To my surprise she said I would definitely find aquavit in Ikea. She didn’t know anything about Swedish punsch, which I guess isn’t common even in Sweden. I had been to the little deli in Ikea looking for interesting things before and never seen any aquavit, but she sounded very certain. I thought about asking her about Sri Lankan arrack, but figured I would sound a bit weird if I asked too many questions about hard to find drinks, and in any case she had only been back to Sri Lanka once since leaving as a child so what would she know about arrack? It turned out that the barmaid was having second thoughts about working in Henrys and probably wouldn’t be there again, so all in all I was lucky to make her acquaintance and find a source of aquavit.

The next day I headed down to Ikea. She was quite right, they had aquavit. I picked up a 500ml bottle of OP Anderson Fine Old Aquavit, plus a box containing a dozen miniatures of different brands.

The barmaid had mentioned that Aquavit was a Christmas drink in Sweden. In fact the reason she was so certain Ikea had the stuff was because her father had been there recently to buy some for Christmas. I decided to get to work and make a Christmas cocktail with the stuff.

Aquavit is more or less a herbal flavored vodka, though unlike vodka Aquavit is sometimes aged. I’m not sure if the brand I bought is aged or not. I suspect not. It has a slightly golden hue, but I think that comes from caramel rather than cask storage. OP Anderson tastes of caraway and anise, but other brands include other ingredients – for example one of the miniatures I bought is flavored with dill. The dill makes sense since the Swedes sometimes drink aquavit with smoked salmon and other fish.

After drinking a glass of the stuff straight I decided the caraway flavors would work well with Galliano and orange juice. Therefore I decided to simply make a Harvey Wallbanger, but substituting Aquavit for the vodka. It isn’t the most creative idea in the world but I thought it would work. Since the Harvey Wallbanger was named after a surfer who used to sling his surfboard up against the wall before walking into a beachside bar at the end of a day’s surfing, this drink is called Frozen Surf – imagine a despondent surfer, wearing colorful Hawaiian shorts, standing on a desolate Swedish beach around Christmas.

Frozen Surf

1.5 oz Aquavit

3 oz orange juice

1/4 oz Galliano

Build in a rocks glass, floating the Galliano on top.

You can adjust the quantity of Galliano to taste. Personally I like to keep the ratio of Galliano down so the Aquavit has a chance to shine.

This drink is crisper and more interesting than the Harvey Wallbanger. The caraway adds an extra dimension, the herbal notes in the aquavit blend with the Galliano, and the orange juice makes it all rather refreshing. Mixing the drink strong (only two parts orange to one part Aquiavit) and going easy on the Galliano stops the drink from being too sweet.

Merry Christmas!

My ex-flatmate from Taiwan was on a business trip in Kunshan, so on Sunday morning I hopped on the train to Suzhou to pay him a visit and check out the crabs at the source. Rather than joining the huge ticket queue inside the station I found the little kiosk selling platform tickets and bought one of those for 1 RMB. Once you have a platform ticket you just need to find your train, jump on, and hope there will be a free seat. Eventually the conductor will find you and sell you a real ticket. If you are unlucky you can end up without a seat but for short distances it doesn’t really matter. Queuing in the station for half an hour to make sure you have a seat on a half hour train ride makes no sense.

After about half an hour or so I arrived in Kunshan and took a motorcycle taxi to my friend’s hotel. There were no ordinary taxis available. It is a little weird to be deposited of the back of an old motorcycle outside a hotel and then have liveried doormen open the door for you. It’s weird in a good way though.

I had a quick minibar beer with my friend (A-Guo). The cheerful cleaning lady who pointed me to the room had enthusiastically gushed that on such a clear day I’d be able to enjoy some fine views from the 20th floor. While A-Guo used the bathroom I stood at the window and took a couple of moments to appreciate the grey apartment blocks, grey sky, and grey canals of Kunshan. I was strangely reminded of Chinese ink landscapes on paper scrolls. A semi-demolished sports ground directly below provided a splash of color, though the debris strewn grass suggested a future more in keeping with its grey surrounds. As I surveyed the scene I thought back to the cleaning lady and had the sense that I was missing something. Perhaps you really need to be Chinese to get these things.

We headed downstairs and jumped in a taxi, a real one this time, out to Yang Chen lake to try the crabs. For some reason Yang Chen lake crabs (otherwise known as hairy crabs) are a famous delicacy in China. Personally I don’t rate them that highly. The flesh is sweeter than most crabs, but they are also smaller and more fiddly. I don’t think the flavor is special enough to justify the hassle and I’d just as soon eat a larger sea crab. I may be wrong but I also imagine that sea crabs live in cleaner water than the Yang Chen lake. Kunshan is a massive industrial area and while the lake is some distance from the factories you have to wonder how clean it is. I’ve heard rumors that the crab prices follow the movements of futures in heavy metals. Actually I made that rumor up myself just now, but I think it’s a fine one and worth repeating.

Near the edge of the lake you reach a big strip of crab restaurants. They all have unimaginative names like ‘Crab King’, ‘Golden Crab’ etc. As we walked along the strip I thought of my own name for a crab restaurant – 蟹谢你*.

The restaurants all back on to the lake, so you get to investigate the crab holding pens and choose your crabs before deciding where to eat. After wandering up and down the strip we selected a restaurant with healthy looking crabs.

The idea is that each diner eats both a male and a female crab. I can’t taste any big difference between the two, but the male is bigger than the female (or possibly it is the other way around). You dip the crab in sweet vinegar flavored with ginger, and accompany the meal with some warm Shaoxing wine. Shaoxing wine is a type of rice wine from the city of Shaoxing, located a few hours away. You can drink the wine straight, but people tend to infuse it with a little ginger and sour plum. We drank a ten year old bottle; it was decent but not exactly Lagavullin.
The lunch was good. I thought the simple and cheap chicken marinated in Shaoxing wine and sesame oil was tastier than the expensive and potentially radioactive crabs. The crabs were good though, and much cheaper out at the lake than they would have been in Shanghai.

By the time we finished lunch it was close to dusk so we just took a quick walk around the lake and headed back to Kunshan. We were going to take a bus back into town but a guy in a van picked us up at a discount to the standard taxi fare. Back in Kunshan we checked out a couple of little bars but found them extremely dead. A-Guo then decided we should go for KTV since his company was entertaining a group of local suppliers. KTV is not really my thing, especially KTV for business people, but once in a while it can be OK so off we went.

If you go to KTV with a group of friends you sit in a private room with a TV and sound system and sing songs. There generally is not a lot of drinking because everyone is having too much fun fighting over the mike to bother with finishing their drinks. If you are a foreigner people will expect you to sing the lamest songs from the English song list. You inevitably have a mike shoved in your face as The Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More starts up. Chinese people are socially and culturally clued up enough to realize that all foreigners love singing Yesterday Once More – “especially the part where he’s breaking her heart” and then there is that other good bit that goes “shing a ling a ling”.

KTV for business people is slightly different. You sit in the same private room but the group is normally male only, and each member of the group is supposed to have a hostess sit with them and chat. The hostesses make sure your party spends lots of money on alcohol by playing drinking games. If necessary the hostesses also help individual group members stay sober by drinking their share of the booze when they lose in the drinking games. The whole set up with the hostesses is thus a little weird. The hostesses will compete against the guy she is sitting with and challenge him to drinking games, but when her guy gets involved in a drinking game with another guy or another hostess, she will step in and help him out by drinking his share. So your hostess is highly dangerous but simultaneously your guardian angel. You could see this as a metaphor for all kinds of male-female relationships. Most of the hostesses will also come home with you at the end of the night if you want them to, though this varies according to the individual. Obviously there is singing as well, but since the hostesses are keeping everyone busy drinking nobody has much time to fight over the mike.

A-Guo and myself arrived later than everyone else, at about 9pm or so. KTV usually starts at around 7.30pm and the real aficionados get there very early to pick the best looking hostesses. We sat down, a group of about eight hostesses were sent in, and I let A-Guo send the first group away. Sending the first group away seems to be a bit of a ritual. The customers get to look discriminating and the shop gets to look like it has a ton of hostesses on hand. Basically everyone looks good. A second group came in and after A-guo picked one from that group I did the same.

A KTV joint usually aims to have more hostesses than there are customers on any given night. The hostesses pay a small stipend to come in to work each day. If they don’t get chosen then they not only don’t get paid but are out of pocket for the night. Provided they get regular business though the money is very good compared to what they would get elsewhere. Most of the girls are pretty but uneducated and would otherwise be working in a factory or a small shop earning maybe RMB1000-1500 per month. In KTV they can earn RMB200 a night simply to drink with customers, and maybe four to five times that if they go home with them. It is lucrative and easy work for the most attractive and personable. For the less naturally gifted a KTV can become a viciously competitive and unfair workplace. Obviously a lot of the girls end up hating each other, and after a few drinks you might get to listen to a convoluted tale about why Brilliant Jade from Anhui is a certifiable bitch.

The girl sitting with me, Yawen, was from some town I’d never heard of in Jiangsu. She had come to Kunshan to work in an electronics factory, left the factory to work in a small fashion boutique, and then left the boutique to work in a KTV and save money to open her own boutique. She was nice but had few topics of conversation besides money – natural enough when you are short of it, but boring nevertheless.

We played some drinking games, mainly 猜拳 (or ‘guess fists’), which involves two people simultaneously flashing their hands at each other and guessing the total number of fingers extended. The loser has to drink. I’m very bad at it because I never play, while Yawen was very good at it because she plays every single night. Naturally I ended up drinking a fair bit. Luckily the booze was mixed quite weak.

In KTV you usually drink Chinese wine, or 白酒(baijiu), which is a clear spirit. Baijiu is usually distilled from grain, typically sorghum, but can be made of almost anything. Baijiu is something like a very fragrant vodka, and not necessarily fragrant in a good way. The flavor profile is not always well balanced, and can include some bizarre esters. In KTV people often pour the baijiu into jugs packed with ice cubes, stir to chill it and let the ice melt a bit, and then decant it into small pouring jugs. I have no idea why this has become the practice in KTVs and nightclubs, and I never noticed people drinking baijiu this way in restaurants. I think the custom is a vague take on the cocktail (sometimes they add lemon wedges, wasabi nuts, tea or other flavorings), and has taken off in KTVs, bars and nightclubs because they are seen as ‘westernized’, and hence appropriate locations for a mixed drink. In contrast, restaurants are seen as more traditional and Chinese venues. Thus in restaurants people drink baijiu straight, possibly warming the bottle in a bowl of water during the winter.

Later we played a very dangerous dice game with hazy rules in which the loser was going to have to drink a largish jug of baijiu. I was within one dice throw of being the fall guy but saved myself with a triple six on my last throw. I think a double six would have been enough to save me, but regardless everyone was very impressed. My hostess asked for my phone number after seeing my dice throwing skills. Seeing the number of sixes people were throwing though I had to wonder whether or not the dice were weighted. I’m sure they were, and I guess all the sixes makes the evening exciting.

The group I was with was mixed Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese. Overall the Taiwanese were reasonably restrained with the hostesses, while the mainlanders were getting involved in some heavy duty groping and pawing. One of the Mainland guys came over to my side of the room and challenged me to drink. I joined him in a glass. As I put my glass down he grabbed my hand and sort of forced it onto my hostess’s tit. Needless to say she absolutely loved this. I’m not sure what he was thinking. Maybe he had seen lots of western porn movies and expected more enthusiasm from me? I apologized to the hostess while continuing to drink with the guy. He calmed down a little but then began asking for my number, saying we would go out together in Shanghai and he would pay for everything (“何先生! 我埋单. 我埋单…”). I gave him the number hoping he would go away. He was plastered and drinking far too fast. I drank a glass or two more with him, then let my hostess keep him company for another glass or so. He just wouldn’t stop drinking though.

I decided to pop off to the toilet, partly because I needed to take a pee and partly in an attempt to lose this idiot. I didn’t bank on him jumping up and following me into the toilet. So I unexpectedly found myself in the toilet with a drunken moron. He was grabbing me by the shoulder still talking about how we would go drinking together in Shanghai and he would pay for everything, while checking and rechecking that my phone number was correct.

This was all getting very tiresome, but more disconcertingly I was wondering what the hell he was doing in the toilet with me. A room in an upscale KTV joint usually has its own toilet, accessed through a door inside the room. This means that you don’t need to go out into the external corridor to get to a toilet, and also that everyone in your group knows who is in the toilet and for how long. Besides being annoying the situation was thus getting embarrassing. First I act less than enthusiastic about groping a strange woman’s tit, then seconds later I disappear into the toilet with another man. If I didn’t get him out of the toilet fast everyone was going to assume we were enjoying a booze fueled quickie. Now some people can probably adopt a relaxed attitude to all of this, maybe thinking “So we had knocked back a few drinks and were feeling pretty loose. Hell, who hasn’t had a homosexual experience?” I admire this attitude. Admiration is precisely where I draw the line though, and at the end of the day I leave this attitude to others.

I needed to get him out of the toilet and fast. I tried vainly to end the conversation. It didn’t matter that I called his mobile to demonstrate that the number I had given him was in fact correct, he simply refused to shut up and leave the toilet, and kept grabbing my arm and talking about going drinking. So what did he want? Was he in fact gay? There was only one way to find out. Groping for some clarity I reached into my pants.

He fled.

Ahh! A heterosexual!

I heaved a sigh of relief and used the facilities in peace.

When I walked back out he was no longer sitting beside my seat and had moved back to the other side of the room. The unsophisticated approach to resolving awkward social encounters is underrated.

The rest of the evening was uneventful enough. At around midnight the hostesses all disappeared, changed out of their uniforms, and returned in normal clothes, giving the signal that it was time to go. We paid up and left, some alone and some with their ‘girlfriends’. To keep the crab theme going we went to a restaurant for crab flavored rice porridge.

The crab porridge restaurant was Taiwanese style and it was interesting to see that most of the KTV girls, who came from all over China (Sichuan, Dongbei, Shanxi, etc.), knew how to make Taiwanese style tea (otherwise known as Minnan style tea). There was a tea set sitting on the table and they immediately got to work with it. The Minnan style of tea-drinking is very specific and forms the basis for the Japanese tea ceremony. Minnan style tea is very potent and served in tiny cups, making it like the tea equivalent of espresso. The etiquette for brewing the tea is fairly relaxed, unlike the complicated Japanese tea ceremony, but making tea this way is still not something that most young Chinese women can do. Outside of Taiwan, Fujian, and parts of Guangdong, where everyone makes tea this way, Minnan tea drinking is more a hobby for a few retirees. Obviously the KTV had lots of Taiwanese customers, which with Kunshan being full of Taiwanese was no surprise.

After the crab porridge I found a taxi and headed back to Shanghai, finally getting home around 4am or so after the driver got lost crossing Shanghai. For some reason the driver spoke Mandarin with me and Kunshan dialect with everyone he stopped to ask directions from in Shanghai. The problem was that nobody in Shanghai could understand anything he said in Kunshan dialect and I ended up ‘translating’ for him. He spoke perfectly fine Mandarin, but his dialect was different enough from Shanghainese to make him unintelligible to the locals.

* ‘Crab’ in Mandarin is pronunced ‘xie’ in a rising tone, while ‘thank you’ is pronounced ‘xie’ in a falling tone. So ‘蟹谢你‘ would mean either ‘the crab thanks you’, or maybe ‘thank you crab’, but would sound very similar to a simple ‘thank you’ (谢谢你). It is a little laborious to explain but kind of clever.

I headed down to the supermarket to pick up some stuff for dinner, in a good mood because I was making 烧酒鸡 (chicken with rice wine and herbs) using real Taiwanese 米酒 (rice wine) – from the iconic pink bottle.

The Taiwanese stuff in the supermarket is all on shelves labeled “imported goods – country of origin China” by the way. You have to wonder. If the stuff is really Chinese then why is it in the imported foods section? And if it comes from Taiwan, and if Taiwan is a part of China, then why do they need to plaster ‘China’ all over the shelves? Practically everything in the supermarket is Chinese, but only the Taiwan section is specifically labeled as Chinese. Why is Taiwan getting special treatment?

Also, would it kill them to actually incorporate the word ‘Taiwan’ in there somewhere? They seem desperate to make the point that Taiwan is a part of China, while being allergic to the word ‘Taiwan’ itself. There is something slightly irrational about all this. The word ‘Taiwan’ in itself does not imply that Taiwan is a country. The Chinese themselves refer to ‘Taiwan province’ after all. I’m sure the manager of Carefour could use the word ‘Taiwan’ in his imported foods section without being trucked out to Xinjiang and shot – and if somebody really does have to be shot I’m sure the manager could arrange for it to be one of the shelf stackers.

I admit it probably isn’t worth anybody getting shot over, but still it would be nice to be able to buy Taiwanese produce from a shelf that said ‘Taiwan’ somewhere. Or if the Taiwanese shelf has to say ‘China’, then logically they then need to plaster ‘China’ across every other shelf too? At least we would get some consistency, and maybe the guy who walks around putting the stickers up could receive a young patriot award or something.

Anyway, I get to the checkout with my bottle of Taiwanese rice wine from China, or if you prefer Chinese rice wine from Taiwan, or PRC rice wine manufactured under the illegal supervision of the bandit government of the ROC (on Taiwan, in China), or however you want to phrase it really. As I’m queuing I inadvertently let a foot or so of free space open up between me and the woman in front, and some middle aged dragon promptly slips into the gap.

I really can’t be arsed accusing her of jumping the queue and listening to the inevitable denial. For some reason Chinese women of middle age and above usually deny having jumped a queue, while men usually apologize. Anyway, rather than talking I just tap her on the shoulder and indicate with my thumb that she should be behind me. Incredibly she says that she is queuing and asks what I want. Well fuck me sideways with a chainsaw. . .

I ask her what she thought I was doing standing in a queue if I wasn’t queuing? Did she think I was waiting for spring to arrive? Another denial, and she adds that me having a big nose (i.e. being a foreigner) doesn’t give me any right to tell her what to do. That remark pissed me off no end. Why do Chinese introduce some racial or international dimension to every minor conflict with a foreigner?

Things were soon deteriorating badly. Before long people were turning round to watch and she was screaming that I’d assaulted her (the tap on the shoulder), injuring her arm. Unbelievable. Anyway, before the thing was finished I well and truly lost my temper. There was the inevitable (and unfortunate) 干你娘* and it was all downhill from there. There were insinuations that she had learned all about 插ing** on her back and was a regular 北港香炉*** (a phrase which nobody in Shanghai seems to understand). People were getting out cameras and taking pictures and stuff, so I am probably going to end up on some Chinese hate site with a death threat or something.

After she started screaming assault I suggested we go find a doctor and I cover her (undoubtedly enormous) medical bills. I guess the idea was calling her bluff or whatever. It was a bad idea of course because if we had got as far as the doctor it would likely have ended up with me forking out a few hundred RMB, to say nothing of wasting hours of time. Luckily one of the managers stepped in and defused things a little. Still, I may avoid that supermarket for a few weeks.

The previous week in a different supermarket an elderly man tried the same trick. Admittedly my own approach was slightly different and rather than do the shoulder tap I just asked him where he thought he was going. His own approach was slightly different too though, since had cut in using the non-confrontational ‘I’m a little lost but maybe I’m in the right place’ strategy. Anyway, he politely got back in the queue behind me and before long we were having the friendliest of chats. He checked carefully through my shopping (it was a bit disconcerting to watch him but he’d been so amicable about the queue jumping I felt obliged to let him have a rummage) and told me I shouldn’t be paying extra for skinless chicken thighs when it would be so easy to skin them myself, and that I should really be drinking Chinese wine instead of foreign stuff.

So a potentially heartwarming Shanghai story was derailed at the outset because a middle aged dragon couldn’t admit she was trying to jump a queue, and instead we ended up with a completely disgraceful scene getting recorded on film. It makes you wonder.

At least the chicken turned out pretty well.

* This means “fuck your grandmother”.

** This is a verb meaning ‘to stick (into)’, and happens to be part of the phrase ‘to jump a queue’ in Chinese. Of course since it also applies to other meanings related to ‘stick’ it has potential for impolite double meanings. What I said was she must have learned about 插-ing in a 理发店 (literally a barber’s shop, but the reality is that most of them are brothels).

*** This phrase literally means ‘north harbor incense burner’ and comes from Taiwan. Taiwan has a big temple to the goddess Mazu in a place called North Harbor. The temple is one of the busiest in Taiwan and every day thousands of people stick joss sticks in the incense burner there. Thus the phrase ‘north harbor incense burner’ is less than respectful when applied to a woman in Taiwan because it means that everybody has stuck their joss stick in her. Mainlanders tend not to understand this one though.