What your Shanghai bartender knows

You know what the Shanghai bar scene looks like from your bar stool, but what does it look like from the other side of the bar? Four of Shanghai's best bartenders gather at Mesa & Manifesto to dish on what’s really driving Shanghai’s booze-fueled evenings.

CNNGo: What are some of the craziest drinks people have ordered from you?

Once a customer poured Sprite into a glass of good vintage Opus wine.
I hate when people ask me for warm milk on a busy night. That's ridiculous!

CNNGo: Mary Ann, after years as the bar manager of Velvet Lounge, you recently opened your own lounge, Bed. How’s the transition been for you?

I opened Bed thinking about the type of place I would like to relax on my day off from Velvet Lounge. You don’t want to party like a crazy animal on your day off, you just want to chill.
They’re customers, Mary Ann. Not crazy animals.
Right. Valued clients. Apart from the crazy animal that shows up every now and then! Bed is designed to be more of a pre-party place than a late-night place like Velvet. The working hours at Velvet were crazy because the place stays open till 5 or 6 in the morning.

For a time it was so busy I even had to sleep there.

They gave me a room upstairs. I lived above Velvet for three months. One day someone’s knocking on my door and I open the door in my underwear. It's a supplier asking me if I want to have a beer. I was like, "Are you crazy? I'm in my underwear!"

Unlike Velvet, Bed closes at 2am at the latest, because I’m getting old!

CNNGo: Adam, you’re the new kid on the bartending block, having arrived in Shanghai just over a year ago. How did you go from growing up in Connecticut to managing one of Shanghai’s best cocktail bars, Manifesto?

Funnily enough my college degree is in economics and finance -- not really related to what I’m doing right now! I’d been to Shanghai previously to study Mandarin for a little bit. The city hooked me. I decided to come back and toss my resume out, and I ended up as a part-time bartender at Velvet Lounge not even a month after I arrived, and subsequently moved to Manifesto.
I remember warning him, "Are you sure you want to get into this business?"

CNNGo: Kin, growing up in Jiangsu Province did you want to be a bartender?

Never. I first came to Shanghai as a temporary worker, just to earn some money. I happened to meet my former boss, who had opened a good Japanese-style bar in Shanghai. Working under him, I realized this was the industry for me. That was back in 1993, so I've already been a bartender for more than 16 years!

When I became a bartender my parents asked me, "How can you choose such a job?" Locals here don’t look upon bartending as a very good profession. But in Tokyo, many bartenders are very respected.

CNNGo: Why do Chinese people look down upon bartending as a lowly profession?

They think it’s something you do for two or three years when you’re young. Lots of young Chinese bartenders think of it as a temporary role, and as a result there aren’t many local bartenders of high skill.

CNNGo: It seems like there are wine bars cropping up on every street corner in Shanghai. What’s up with that?

Wine has gotten so popular here because it’s low-cost. Let's say I buy a bottle of wine for RMB 40, I can sell it for RMB 200. Compare that to making a Cosmopolitan: you have a bottle of vodka and a bottle of lime, cranberry, Cointreau and so on. Then you have to count how much of each individual ingredient you used. It's much simpler to sell a bottle of wine. You just serve it. No energy or time wasted making cocktails. And if you're selling it by the glass you can get six glasses out of that bottle if you're trying to save.
It’s economics. Wine producers and distributors from all over the world are looking to China, and Shanghai specifically as an emerging market where they can move their product. So we've got a lot of money and energy from the wine supply end coming in.
Definitely. It’s unbelievable how many small wine suppliers are coming into China.
Even my neighbor owns a vineyard in California!
Now there’s so much wine available in Shanghai that it’s practical to open a wine bar. There are a lot of liquors and liqueurs available here but not to the extent of wine. Bartenders have to hand-carry a lot of the specialty products we use into China or we can’t get them at all.
The limited availability of some ingredients in Shanghai has taught me the importance of improvising. Four years ago I had to find a way to make a drink taste like melon even though we didn't have any proper melon liqueur.

CNNGo: Kin, since you opened Constellation 10 years ago, have you noticed any changes in local drinking habits?

In the beginning, Constellation had no Chinese customers. Our customers were 100 percent Japanese. After about five years, we began to see some European customers. Today, about 20 percent of our patrons are Chinese.

Previously, Chinese people were just looking for a lively atmosphere with alcohol; they didn’t care about the quality of the alcohol.

Lately I’ve noticed a change in our customers; their understanding of liquor and demand for high quality drinks has increased a lot, which is good news for me.

If my customers don't demand high quality, then what's the point of Constellation? If people just want a glass with some alcohol in it, they can go anywhere.

I had Chinese customers at The Glamour Bar who would come in and order the most expensive bottle of red wine on the menu every time. They had a lot of money to throw around.

They'd eaten steak for dinner and they wanted red wine for the rest of the night and they wanted everyone to see them ordering it.

After one year of talking to these guys and showing them different things, they'd come to the bar and one of them knew he liked pinot noir and the other knew he liked a very dry new world merlot.

It didn't take long for their tastes to mature. This is the new Chinese consumer.

CNNGo: What’s your cocktail of choice?

A rye Manhattan is fantastic in cold weather, although you can’t find rye in Shanghai.
I call it a Vancouver. It’s a Canadian whiskey with apple juice and fresh lime. Every girl has a sweet tooth. You want something sweet but still strong enough to give you a kick.
A dry martini. With gin, of course.
My favorite drink is always the next one!