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Food & Drink

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

A bartender is torching a drink in a quirky container shaped like a pig dressed as a soldier, holding ice and garnished with flower petals and a cinnamon stick.
BlindPig, a 4-month-old lounge on Polk Street, is a kind of Chinese-American “post-tiki” bar, serving elaborate cocktails out of over-the-top vessels. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

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.

A bartender uses a flame to garnish a yellow drink in a geometric glass, with a burst of fire surrounding the drink on a dimly lit bar.
Bartender Leo Lopez lights a fire over the lounge's eponymous cocktail, made with Ming River baijiu, ma po tofu, basil, plum wine, yellow mustard, mango and lemon. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

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. 

The image shows a silhouette of a person raising a bottle in front of a brightly lit store shelf filled with various colorful packaged products.
Lopez shakes up a drink in front of a window decal that conceals the bar from the street. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

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.”

The image features a pink pig statue in a suit, holding a golf club and standing next to a green pot with Chinese characters. A large, yellow fan with writing in the background.
The cocktail menus are handwritten on Japanese-style fans. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

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.”

The image shows sections of a golden-colored folding hand fan with handwritten text in English and Chinese, listing various drink names and ingredients.
Many of the drinks take their names from a 16th century Chinese novel. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

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. 

A glass with an amber liquid, likely a cocktail, has a square ice cube featuring an intricate design. It rests on a round, blue coaster.
Hand-stamped ice is just one of the many details at BlindPig that owner Derrick Li is hoping will vault the bar into the stratosphere. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard

Astrid Kane can be reached at astrid@sfstandard.com