This password-protected cocktail bar pours some of the craziest drinks in SF

If you want to enter the BlindPig Speakeasy, a 4-month-old lounge on San Francisco’s Polk Street, then you’re going to need a password, which changes every week. Owner Derrick Li shares it via a pinned post on the bar’s Instagram page, adding a bit of intrigue to a boozy corridor that seems to have otherwise lost some of its nightlife spark.

Anyone who makes the effort to learn the magic words — hint hint, it’s a phrase that probably has the word “pig” in it — will be welcomed into a space that is at once low-key and completely over-the-top. The furnishings are muted and the light is low, but the front window is plastered with a blown-up image of snack packages in an Asian supermarket. The cocktail menus are written out by hand in Chinese and English on the folds of yellow Japanese fans.

Some drinks, like the $15 White Dragon Horse (Kavalan Select No. 1 whiskey, vanilla black tea syrup, Giffard pamplemousse liqueur, bitters and smoke) are approachable enough. Others, like the $17 Blind Pig (Ming River baijiu, ma po tofu cordial, basil, plum wine, yellow mustard, mango vodka and lemon), veer into the avant-garde. One involves “hot pot paste.” Another uses hot-and-sour soup — or, at least, a derivative of the Chinese takeout staple that involves steeping 13 to 15 ingredients in a bucket overnight, curdling with hot milk, then straining the resulting “soup” through coffee filters. 

Li, who once helmed China Live’s upstairs hideaway Cold Drinks Bar, is open about his ambition to make BlindPig one of the world’s great cocktail bars, mixing elaborately constructed drinks with Chinese-American influences. They’re served in kitschy and often porcine-shaped vessels, like a red glazed ceramic pig. It’s all a reference to “Journey to the West,” a 16th century Chinese novel that “90% of Asians read when they’re little kids,” Li said. “It’s about five flying animals, and we’re going to open five locations.”

If BlindPig sounds a little like a Chinese-inflected tiki bar, rest assured — it’s not. The drinks are not sugary; there’s no problematic blurring of Polynesia with the Caribbean; it doesn’t rain indoors like it does at the Tonga Room. At the same time, several drinks do incorporate fire, mostly by burning an aromatic garnish. Think of it as “post-tiki,” maybe, while acknowledging the place of baijiu, the high-alcohol Chinese spirit distilled from sorghum. Li believes baijiu’s time has come. (Polkcha, a new Korean-inspired cocktail bar six blocks away, makes heavy use of the spirit as well.) 

“Five or seven years ago, not many bars carried mezcal,” Li rationalized, adding that it’s now among the fastest-growing spirits. “My goal is to bring baijiu up to a different level.”

Of course, for anyone who prefers that aforementioned Mexican spirit, BlindPig has it, too. The Pig Steals My Purple Corn combines Vago mezcal, a pineapple-bun cordial, prickly pear, blackberry, sage, pineapple and lime. It comes in the wackiest “glass” of all: an upside-down pig propped on its forelegs and smiling with its eyes closed, like a statue of Buddha.