Asian Culture Is Your Hottest New Cocktail
By J. J. Ghosh | 25 May, 2026

The food of our culture was once a punchline on late night TV. Now it's a fish sauce margarita at one of the best bars in America.

About a decade ago, James Corden would play a game on his CBS late night show called “Fill Your Guts or Spill Your Guts.”

The game was effectively truth or dare, but when a competitor chose to plead the fifth, they had to eat something disgusting as a punishment.

The disgusting food in question?  Chicken feet, jellyfish, thousand year old egg.

In other words: Asian delicacies.

James Corden's recurring comedy segment featured "disgusting" foods

The food of our culture was presented as disgusting on a major American television show.  Observing our heritage was literally being labelled a punishment.

This could have been a humiliating moment for us.  Asian Americans might have distanced themselves from the cuisine and insisted that these disgusting foods are an ancient relic of our ancestors — that we enjoy pizza and McDonald’s as much as our peers.

We did the opposite.  We started putting these ingredients in our cocktails and selling them for top dollar.

SF and Beyond

SF AAPI Cocktail Week just completed its fourth annual run — five days in which bars across San Francisco served cocktails built from pandan, baijiu, chrysanthemum, shochu, fish sauce, osmanthus, and the entire aromatic pantry of the Asian diaspora.  This year’s theme was “Spice Routes,” celebrating the rich diaspora of ingredients and flavors that define AAPI cultures across regions and generations.  The 2026 event brought in bartenders from some of Asia’s 50 Best Bars — including Bar Us, ranked No. 4, and Penrose, ranked No. 10 — alongside local San Francisco talent for pop-ups, mixing competitions, and collaborative events.

But the movement extends well beyond one week in San Francisco. 

SF AAPI Cocktail Week just completed it's fourth run

At San Antonio bar Jue Let, owner Jennifer Dobbertin — raised by a Chinese mother from Taiwan — serves a cocktail called The Taipei Personality: Scotch and chrysanthemum tea.  “It represents two things many of us grew up with: Scotch and tea,” she said.  The combination would’ve seemed bizarre to most Western drinkers a decade ago.  Now it’s a signature drink at one of Texas’s most acclaimed bars.  At the same bar, a glittering, manicured chicken foot hangs suspended from the ceiling.  Not because it’s ironic.  Because it’s home. 

Elsewhere, ghee-washed mezcal has appeared on menus — a drink in which clarified butter, the foundational fat of South Asian cooking, is used to fat-wash a smoky Mexican spirit, resulting in something that tastes simultaneously ancient and completely unhinged.  If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d one day be paying $18 for a cocktail whose base ingredient is the stuff my mother used to rub on my head for dandruff, I wouldn’t have believed you.  And yet here we are, and it’s delicious.

Fish sauce is now appearing in cocktails at some of the most acclaimed bars in America, alongside miso paste, soy sauce, and seaweed-infused syrups — part of a broader umami cocktail trend that bartenders describe as “carefully balanced with sweet, sour, citrusy, and spicy elements.”

We didn’t change.  The fish sauce didn’t change.  What changed is that the culture caught up.

The Pandan Moment

If there’s a single ingredient that captures where AAPI cocktail culture is right now, it’s pandan.

Pandan — a tropical plant used across Southeast Asia for its fragrant, vanilla-adjacent, slightly grassy flavor — was until recently almost entirely unknown to non-Asian American consumers.  It colored rice green.  It flavored kueh.  It was, for many of us, the smell of a grandmother’s kitchen.

SF AAPI Cocktail Week this year featured an entire event called the Pandan Party — an all-inclusive evening of unlimited pandan cocktails and pandan-inspired bites, sponsored by a dedicated pandan liqueur called Kota Pandan alongside Ming River Baijiu and Iichiko Shochu.  There’s now a liqueur made specifically from pandan.  Let that sit for a moment.

A Portland bar manager described his pandan cocktail — the Sky King, using pandan, shochu, Calpico, and lime — and noted: “Perhaps folks are starting to venture off the beaten path and are enjoying not-so-common flavors?  Palates could be changing.”

Palates are changing.  But so is something else.  The bartenders putting pandan in their drinks aren’t doing it because Western consumers discovered pandan.  They’re doing it because they decided their own ingredients deserved to be in the glass — and dared the world to catch up.

Representation  

The cocktail isn’t the whole story.  The person making it is also the story.

Only 3.7% of bartenders in the United States are AAPI.  That number — startling given that Asian Americans are 6% of the population and disproportionately concentrated in urban areas where bars thrive — is the context in which SF AAPI Cocktail Week exists.  The goal isn’t just to make interesting drinks.  It’s to make the industry look different.  To demonstrate that Asian bartenders exist, are world-class, and have flavors and stories that the industry has been ignoring.

The Baijiu Frontier

For sheer audacity, nothing in the AAPI cocktail world matches the ongoing attempt to introduce baijiu to American drinkers.

Baijiu is China’s national spirit, the world’s most consumed spirit by volume, and almost entirely unknown in the United States outside of Chinese American communities.  It’s a colorless, high-octane grain spirit with a complex flavor profile — fruity, earthy, peppery — that’s served neat in small cups at Chinese banquets and has a reputation among Westerners who’ve encountered it as somewhere between “interesting” and “paint thinner.”

Western markets aren’t adopting baijiu the way China drinks it.  They’re adopting it in cocktails.  Brands like Ming River were built specifically for this — designed with cocktail bartenders in mind, with lower proofs and flavor profiles that play well in mixed drinks.  Ming River Baijiu was a featured sponsor of SF AAPI Cocktail Week, appearing at multiple events throughout the five days.

The baijiu cocktail is the AAPI drink world’s most ambitious bet: that an ingredient so deeply foreign to the Western palate can be made familiar through the universal language of a well-made drink.  It’s also, more quietly, a statement of pride.  We’re not going to rename this or soften it or present it as “Chinese vodka” so you’re more comfortable.  It’s baijiu.  Try it.

Power Move 

James Corden left late night television in 2023.  The Fill Your Guts or Spill Your Guts segment went with him.

 The chicken feet, the jellyfish, the thousand year old egg — they stayed.  They just moved to a better venue. 

For generations, Asian American kids brought their food to school and were told it smelled wrong.  They opened their lunchboxes and felt the particular shame of a culture that hadn’t yet been deemed acceptable for public consumption.  The fish sauce stayed home.  The pandan went undiscussed.  The baijiu was for family dinners only.

What AAPI bartenders are doing now is the adult version of opening that lunchbox without apology — and then charging $18 for it, which is honestly also a power move.

The cocktail is delicious.  The fish sauce is intentional.  The ghee is the point.

Hopefully we’ll see one of these drinks on a late night talk show sometime soon. Just not during a comedy segment.