Laowai cocktail bar is hidden behind Blnd Tger Dumplings in Vancouver’s Chinatown, evoking the speakeasy days of the Far East
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Where: 251 East Georgia St., Vancouver.
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When: Blnd Tger, noon to midnight, Tuesday to Sunday; Laowai, from 5 pm.
Info: instagram.com/whereislaowai; instagram.com/blndtgerdumplings
The name for a bar Lewis Hart had been planning for years crash landed on him at a precise moment in Chongqing, China. He was totally lost, searching for Dong Ting Xian Hot Pot, underground and off the beaten track in an old bomb shelter.
“Laowai!” someone called to him, offering a directional assist. “I only had a picture of the place. He walked 15, 20 minutes with me to where I needed to be, then waved and left. I looked up laowai when I got back to Wi-Fi and found it translates to an old outsider or foreigner, but it’s meant with respect like for an elder.”
Cue light bulb flash!
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“Shanghai was an international melting pot and very open to foreigners when the rest of the world wasn’t getting along,” Hart says. “The ground rules were that everyone was welcome.”
Hart was dazzled by the international heyday of Shanghai’s fabled golden era and its speakeasy culture of the 1920s. He wanted that vibe. The Shanghai speakeasies were immune to military police in pre-Communist China and attracted high society to low lifers as well as foreigners, like Canadian and American soldiers, who were under their home nation’s Prohibition laws.
To find Hart’s Laowai cocktail bar, you don’t need an old gentleman to show you the way. Go to his storefront Chinatown dumpling shop, Blnd Tger, which sells six kinds of dumplings. You ask for the Number Seven and staff will lead you through a distressed freezer door and bam! you’re in a different space and time. Do not, however, expect to be seated right away. It’s the best unkept secret in town.
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Blnd Tger, by the way, lost its ‘i’s, a play on eyes, when another company issued a cease and desist order for trademark infringement, although “blind tiger” is a very common slang expression for speakeasy.
“We had every right but didn’t think it was worth the hassle,” Hart says.
The chef for both Blnd Tger and Lao Wai is Phong Vo, most recently the chef at now-closed Ampersand dim sum restaurant in Gastown. The six kinds of dumplings are served in sets of three or four and cost $8 to $10. They criss-cross China and into Tibet and are not tradition-bound. There is, for example, single malt scotch infused into the xiao long bao soup and a Chinese New Year favourite, jaozi, is vegan, with TMRW meat alternative. Bison momo is a play on Tibetan yak momo, seeing as yak is a tad difficult to source.
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They shop for meats, produce and tea in the neighbourhood, supporting the Chinese merchants.
“The pork and chicken are from next door and the fish is from across the street,” says Hart.
And the dumplings are outsourced — made by Kam Wai, a dim sum business in the ‘hood, following Blnd Tger recipes.
The sturdy Sichuan Zhong dumpling with pork filling is my favourite with its thick chili oil and house-made soy sauce. The Xinjiang cumin lamb dumpling would not have been the same without the peppercorn soy sauce that punched it up. Vegetable shaomai, Inner Mongolia style, had eggplant, shiitake and fermented tofu bundled in a spinach dough. I’m usually a xiao long bao fangirl and looked forward to the single malt infused soup in the dumpling, but by the time I got home the liquid seemed to have leaked out and it was deflated and flat.
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Meanwhile, beyond the freezer door, London’s Bergman Interiors — which “has won every single award you can think of,” as Hart says — designed a space that transports you to a dreamy underground landscape adhering to feng shui principles. A flock of birds flying overhead provides the dim lighting in somewhat of a symbolic formation, starting with peacocks at the rear and cranes and phoenixes heading to the door.
“As you leave, you walk into the neighbourhood that’s revitalizing,” says Hart. The rings in the malachite wall are referred to as the eyes of peacocks, he says.
The food at Laowai syncs with the creative exotic cocktails that operating partner Alex Black, a total cocktail nerd, dreams up — cocktails like my delicious Jade Empire with Midori Melon liqueur, clarified kiwi cordial, aloe vera, matcha tincture and Ms. Betters Strawberry Mah Kwan Bitters. More on the drinks later.
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If you’re there to eat as well as drink, don’t miss the pork belly glistening with bourbon char siu glaze. It’s deeply marinated and so tender. Dishes range from $8 to $18.
I really wasn’t expecting the smoking tofu noodles to impress, but they did. The Shaanxi ‘biang biang’ noodles are hand-ripped into wide strips, with smoked tofu nestled within. The authentic dish might give you third-degree burns, but this one’s been tamed.
Baijiu drunken chicken was sedately drunk. I was expecting staggeringly drunk after my excellent first-time adventure with baijiu, a firey spirit. The cold chicken is steamed, then marinated in Shaoxing wine and baijiu and plated with pickled loganberry for flavour pops.
Another thriller dish was Yunnan-style crispy eggplant. It outflanks chef Ottolenghi’s many ways with eggplant. It’s quickly deep-fried and followed by a dry fry with lemongrass, which crisps it up and adds a smoke.
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But the heart of Laowai is the drinks. Black has been behind the bar at Wildebeest, Vancouver Club, Hawksworth and Nightingale and he’s got some dazzling cocktail moves.
“It’s a story-inspired menu. I have a data base of hundreds of important people in Shanghai and Chinese history. Instead of starting with sweet, sour, bitter, I build a drink around these people. Usually one or two things jump out about a person and I build off that.”
For example, Jack Riley was a gambling kingpin in Shanghai, “a Prohibition-era life Al Capone would envy.” His first bar, the Manhattan, gave him a foothold for a 15-year monopoly on Shanghai’s slot machines until he was arrested in 1940. He inspired Black’s aromatic, bittersweet Manhattan cocktail. The cocktails speak Chinese with ingredients like Chinkiang vinegar, bamboo-infused coconut milk, ginger, salted Asian pear and goji berry-infused Lillet Rosé.
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But it’s the baijiu list that captivated me. It’s the heaviest-consumed alcohol in the world you’ve probably never heard of. It’s strong — 55 to 66 per cent alcohol, not the usual 40 per cent we’re accustomed to — and the difference from other spirits is the addition of a fermenting agent to the base grain of sorghum, wheat, rice or corn.
“Baijiu is an umbrella term for spirits from different regions in different styles. The important thing is they use qu, which is like a sourdough starter made of grain to start the fermentation process. It’s a ball of bacteria and enzymes to convert starch to sugar. In the West, they use barley which has enzymes that do it.”
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Opinions on this newcomer to the West are divisive, but I’m a fan of the flavours that go on and on along with a ghostly heat from the alcohol.
“It can be harsh,” Black says. “You’re definitely forced to make up your mind. It’s got big, big, big, big flavours. There is flavour after flavour after flavour after flavour.”
Says Hart: “Really, all our expectations have been blown away. We thought we’d sell maybe five, six bottles a week as a solo spirit, but we’re doing 20 bottles and it never drops below that.”
As for making cocktails with baijiu, it’s a whole new world, Black says. If you’re curious, Luzhou from Sichuan is a good starter baijiu, he says. “It has a strong aroma of overripe pineapple so it’s familiar and accommodating. Yellow Crane from Hubei region with a strong floral scent is another.
But first, you start by ordering the “Number Seven.”
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Source: vancouversun.com
