I got hit by the Tales of the Cocktail thing and never got a chance to finish writing up the places I visited for drinks in San Francisco.

On day three I visited the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning.  The thing is huge so walking to it like I did is a mistake.  You think you will be there in a few minutes, but it ends up taking you forever.  The fort that sits below the south end of the bridge was pretty cool, as were all the historic houses I passed on my way there. (more…)

Internet access has been absolutely horrible so here is a late account of my second day in San Francisco. . .

Today, still in a luggageless state, I did a little tourist stuff then further explored San Francisco’s cocktail and drinking scene. 

I had a breakfast of coffee and donuts, listening to a black guy and a Mexican talking about San Francisco in the 60s.  The Mexican guy seemed to be high on something or other.  Around midday I went to the Asian Art Museum and spent a few hours there.  The collection is impressive, but the presentation, labeling and breadth are what make the place stand out.  Why does no museum actually located in Asia have a comparably organized display?  Some bits of the collection were organized according to key cultural influences (religion and so on), so that exhibits on early Indian Buddhism would lead you on to chronologically later yet derivative Chinese, Indonesian and Thai exhibits.  It was an educational way of setting things up. (more…)

I am now en-route to Tales of the Cocktail, traveling via San Francisco. I got to San Francisco on Friday after a 24-hour-plus marathon of delayed flights and lost luggage. I checked into a hotel around Union Square, then took a walk over the hill and down to Fishermen’s Wharf. The architecture in San Francisco is great - row after row of cozy looking apartments, and a ton of what I am guessing are early Art-Deco commercial buildings. (more…)

I considered writing the Charlie Chaplin up for Raiders of the Lost Cocktail. I decided not to in the end though. Partly I wanted to write up a drink that combined Lillet with apricot brandy, and partly I was not sure if the Charlie Chaplin qualifies as being ‘lost’. I have occasionally seen the Charlie Chaplin on bar menus. Still, the name of the drink is rather old worldly, as is the use of sloe gin, so I won’t argue with anyone who wants to label it a lost drink.

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. (more…)

There is a club in Phnom Penh called the Heart of Darkness where I spent a couple of memorable evenings back in August. I drank Guinness and Tequila Slammers. The environment was a confused medley of Cambodian elites and their gun toting body guards (the doormen were very selective when searching customer for weapons), local foreign residents, higher class working girls (since the working girls apparently had to pay a fee to get in), and bemused looking tourists. It was lots of fun, but not really a sit-back-and-savor-your-drink type of environment. I have no idea if Heart of Darkness served Martinique rum. I discovered the dry and complex tasting Martinique rums at some other bars in Cambodia, most notably Riverside in Battambang, which gives huge pours of the excellent St. James Ambre for just US$1. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)