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CHINA.
THE MOTHERLAND,
A GREAT UNKNOWN.
I was born to a Taiwanese father and Australian mother and raised in a single parent western household from the age of 10 in Australia. Save for what I remember as a young child and what I’ve taken the initiative to learn as an adult, I grew up removed from my Asian heritage, from Sino culture and half my family.
Over the years I started to reconcile the uncomfortable sensation of familial displacement.
A fringe feeling of belonging but not-quite belonging. I noticed the total lack of peers or idols that I could relate to, the absence of a People with comparable heritage or relatable upbringing. I struggled with my ethnic identity and internalised a quiet confusion.
The food and the dishes of my childhood were a great comfort to me growing up. Nostalgic Chinese and Taiwanese flavours, tastes and smell memories were a steadfast, unchanging constant in a landscape of longing and wonder.
Food heals. Food comforts. Food finds us and holds us to a time and place.
Between 2011 to 2023 I had only visited Taiwan and my Father’s side of the family on two occasions. I knew little of the land and our ancestral home of mainland China seemed as foreign and fantastical as Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. I’d never asked about my family’s mainland roots or how and when they came to Taiwan.
For most of my adult life, I safeguarded a burning curiosity and desire to experience the country and culture responsible for half my family and half of me.
In the early months of 2023, Down The Rabbit Hole was born.
Conceptualised as a brand collaboration rooted in connection, discovery, personal storytelling and shared heritage with Peddlers Gin Co.
I’m an avid appreciator of the “closed loop”. When the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed and the concept is watertight. It seemed a touch ethereal that this would take place during the Year of the Rabbit. To be able to harness the spirit of cunning, speed, journey, adventure and safe ventures home.
To do as Alice did and fall down a rabbit hole.
CREATIVITY, COLLABORATION,
SHARED HERITAGE
I’d met Ryan, one of the Peddler’s Gin founders in a chance meeting when he happened to be in Brisbane in the closing months of 2022. At that time I was unfamiliar with the brand and it’s Chinese roots. The early stage pitch was essentially a series of guest shifts across Asia leading to Shanghai under the Down The Rabbit Hole concept. The Peddlers team came back with a counter proposal for a month-long residency in Chengdu at the Temple House’ Jing Bar.
It’s a rare and unique opportunity to have this kind of freedom, creativity and collaboration between brand, bartender and venue.
Independent and start-up brands are usually bound by a myriad of limitations, particularly when considering activations without a direct financial ROI and established brands have surpassed any leg-up-to-the-little-man mentality, most are acquired by a global distributor and are at the mercy of their parent company, requiring countless steps of review across a similar amount of eyes and departments.
Peddler’s afforded me full creative control of the project. I took it, with thanks and ran.
The comic to promote Down The Rabbit Hole was born out of the single irritating factor that I had no access to the host venue for visuals or imagery. I wanted to do something creative and different, that would evoke the wonder and emotion driving the collaboration.
Originally, I thought about an animation inspired by the iconic scene in Alice in Wonderlandwhere Alice chases the White Rabbit and falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Visuals that wouldn’t need to rely on photography or videography and a format that would allow a storytelling component and afford pretty much complete creative control.
As animation can be prohibitively expensive, it was an unfeasible option, so I settled for something much more achievable and storyboarded a comic/manga with additional references to the Matrix, Fight Club and Mirai.
Peddlers granted branding and usage permissions and the comic was released on Instagram, one page per day in the leadup to the residency and partnership announcement.
Written by yours truly and illustrated by Soussherpa
The Down The Rabbit Hole menu aimed for smashability, conceptual coherence and value whilst maintaining versatility across a completely Gin-based cocktail list. With several nostalgic love letters to taste and ingredient pairings to reflect my mixed heritage. The menu consisted of four newly ideated cocktails just for DTRH and four signature cocktails tweaked to serve on Peddler’s Gins as well as suggested Peddlers Gin and tonic and martini serves. It’s a great joy & opportunity to bring unique flavours and their stories from Australia to the rest of the world and a personal pleasure of mine to pair them with Asian ingredients.
PAINTING THE ROSES RED
Peddlers Shanghai Gin, Rose, Lychee and Citrus, Clarified, Carbonated, red cacao swipe.
杜松子酒, 玫瑰, 柠檬, 荔枝, 可可, 碳酸的
QUEEN OF HEARTS
Peddlers Barrel Aged Gin, Mr Black, Campari, Sweet Vermouth, Chewy Nougat, edible card.
杜松子酒, 咖啡, 金巴利, 红苦艾酒, 胡桃
DRINK ME
Peddlers Barrel Aged Gin, Mango Trail Mix, Tea, White Aperitif, Wattleseed, dissolvable instructions.
杜松子酒, 芒果, 茶, 胡桃, 苦艾酒, 澳大利亚人土果
AROUND THE FUR
Peddlers Salted Plum Gin, Baiju, Soy Berry, Citrus, Emulsifier, Davidson Plum
杜松子酒, 话梅, 柠檬, 味噌, 野果, 澳大利亚人李子
FRANKLY MY DEAR (aka IDGAF)
Peddlers Shanghai Gin, Strawberry Gum, Cranberry, Tonka, Pandan, Yilk Punch
杜松子酒, 澳大利亚人草莓桉树, 蔓越莓, 零陵香豆, 班兰, 酸奶
THE RIZZ (aka I Want To Squeeze His Fluffy Little Tail)
Peddlers Shanghai Gin, Peach, Citrus, Vanilla, Coconut, Clarified, Carbonated, CocoWhip, Dairy-free.
杜松子酒, 桃 ,柠檬, 香草, 椰子, 碳酸的, 椰子生奶油
XOXO
Peddlers Shanghai Gin, XO, Dry Vermouth, Soy, Sesame
杜松子酒, XO酱, 苦艾酒, 酱油, 芝麻油
SUNNYBOY (by The Gresham)
Peddlers Shanghai Gin, Coconut-Butter Wash, Pineapple, Passionfruit, Vanilla
杜松子酒, 椰子输液, 菠萝, 百香, 香草
With Asia 50 Best coinciding around the time of departing Australia, Down the Rabbit Hole consisted of several guest shifts before the residency in China, starting at The Gresham in Brisbane Australia then on to Hong Kong at Shady Acres and Hope & Sesame in Guangzhou before settling into it’s month-long residency at Temple House’s Jing Bar in Chengdu.
To have the opportunity to stay and work in the country I had always been so curious about, my ultimate place of simultaneous connection and disconnect [even more so than my dear Taiwan] was a priceless venture in self-discovery and introspection.
The meetings and planning and emails and admin about Down The Rabbit Hole started way back in January 2023, but the story, the experience, the real shit started in July 2023 when we landed in China.
On July 26th, Down the Rabbit Hole touched down in Chengdu amongst the warmest of welcomes. Launch night was surreal, months and months of hard work and planning by all involved was realised over the course of a few hours, settling the residency into its month-long home of Jing Bar at The Temple House. I’ll be forever grateful for the support of Ryan, Jannick and both the Peddlers and Temple House teams, it could not have gone smoother or have been better received.
Everbody eats.
Food reaches across cultural barriers and societal differences. It doesn’t give a shit about politics and religion. In my opinion it’s one of the purest forms of connection we can experience no matter where in the world we are or come from.
Being of Chinese heritage, eating in China was my pilgrimage to culinary Mecca.
Enough travel has taught me that you will never have pasta as it’s made in Italy or tacos as they’re made in Mexico.
Maybe it’s being in the country itself that imbibes the food with an other-worldy element of emotion and understanding.
Those who love to eat, who love to be adventurous with food will know what I’m talking about.
Which is why I’ll take street food over restaurant fine dining any day.
The sight of plastic stools on pavement and wonky tables and hand-drawn signs send me onto paroxysms of delight and anticipation.
Photographing and eating street food and local fare is one of my favourite things about travelling.
It's almost the direct antithesis to all the content I shoot professionally. You can't orchestrate it, you can't organise it, you can't direct it. Sometimes you’re not even allowed to photograph it. If the tablecloth clashes with the placemat and there's chips in the plates, too bad. The light, setting, cutlery and crockery; you get what you get. But that's what makes it special. Shots are snuck in between bites. The people are there to eat. They're not there to angle the fork this way and that, lift the plate a little more, stab and hold. And you are too, just like all forms of candid photography it's great practice for efficient shooting and composition.
Most of the time these meals are special moments of discovery, shared with new and old friends, a true insight into the host country's culture and an experience you may have been looking forward to your whole life. It’s one of my life’s pleasures that I get the regular opportunity to capture something I love and enjoy so dearly.
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan Province and a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. Mapo Tofu, Dan Dan Noodles, Hot Pot and Kung Pao Chicken are all traditional dishes of the region. Everything is spicy. The only thing that rivals the attraction of the city’s food is the Giant Panda.
Of all the wonderful food I ate whilst in Chengdu these experiences were my favourite and the most notable.
Tell anyone in Chengdu you’re visiting for the first time and the two recommended must do’s are always the same; Pandas and hot pot. We’re in Sichuan so the food is spicy. A week is all it took to shift a fundamental food preference for me, eating anything without heat or a good dose of salt started to taste bland. I noticed this when I caught myself jonesing for some Siracha to defile a McDonalds cheeseburger with [hey, when in China]. How can you not when the omnipresence of Sichuan pepper is sending you to the moon every second day?
Hot pot in my childhood home was a clear, salty broth with glass noodles and assorted meat and vegetables for dunking and cooking. Streaky rolls of frozen beef, prawns, fishball, beef ball, cabbage, enoki and shiitake mushrooms. The broth was enjoyed as a soup at the end. If you tried to drink the broth of Sichuan hot pot you’d probably shit yourself for a week.
The two ways hot pot is enjoyed in Chengdu are the traditional dunk-and-cook-yourself way with the soup base constantly heated over a gas fire, or as “Cold Pot” where your ingredients are cooked or blanched for you and served to you on sticks in a giant metal bowl full of spicy Sichuan soup base. The high oil content and metal keeps the stock hot and continues to cook your meat and veg.
Peddlers developed their gin with Sichuan Hot Pot in mind, one of the botanicals used is literally Sichuan pepper.
On my first night in the city, we went to a restaurant not far from the bar for our Sichuan hot pot induction. The menu had over a hundred options for accompaniments to choose from. Among others we plumped for abalone, shrimp, bullfrog, tripe, tofu, lup chong, lap yuk and assorted vegetables. One side of the hot pot contained the traditional, intimidating deep-red, spicy base, the other a non-spicy mushroom stock. The spicy side of this hot pot is more like a boiling chilli oil with tongue-numbing Sichuan pepper and whole dried chillies dancing ominously on the surface. Plastic gloves, a bib and a Coke Zero completed the experience. One of the best welcome dinners of any welcome dinner ever.
“Cold Pot” was a late night, after work affair at a 20+ year establishment on Wangping Road. Hundreds of skewered vegetables lay on tables on the pavement, the meats and seafood in lukewarm fridges just inside the restaurant. We pick’n’mixed our way through the piles of accompaniments, loading the plastic, pastel baskets to the brim and handing it all over for pre-cooking in boiling water.
The condiment station was a crowded tabletop with dozens of ingredients to choose from; sesame oil, peanut paste, soy sauce both light and dark, coriander, chives, spring onions, mashed garlic, six types of chilli, salt and pepper, MSG, crushed nuts and more. Further pick’n’mixing required to form a highly personal, optimal condiment bowl to dip your meat and veg into.
When that giant bowl of steaming skewers dropped onto our table I thought I’d died and gone to heaven atop my plastic stool. We sipped on peanut milk in glass bottles and ate surrounded by pink tiles and PVC butchers curtain that struggled to keep the aircon in and the Sichuan Summer out. After this first visit I ended up here twice more. It was just that good.
The humble dumpling 饺子 [jiaozi]
My Last Meal, my favourite food and what I’d choose if I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life. Specifically the Taiwanese pork and cabbage/pork and chive dumplings I grew up making and eating.
Every province in China has its own cuisine, it’s own specialty dishes and iterations of nationwide classics.
Since we’re in Sichuan, you best believe the dumplings are served with a chilli oil. Egg and chive and pork and corn seem to be the popular stuffing options here. I tried dozens of dumplings whilst in Chengdu and none quite matched up to the fantastic spot Jannick form the Temple House took us to on our second night in Chengdu. Steamed egg and chive and pork with mixed veg wrapped in a thick, housemade dumpling pastry. Chilli and Sichuan pepper oil and brown vinegar soy for dipping. We BYO’d a bottle of Peddlers Pineapple & Fizz and drank it from rice bowls with convenience store ice. The lights were that specific shade of hole-in-the-wall fluorescent, the walls tiled and the fans dusty. I couldn’t imagine enjoying my first bowl of dumplings in China any other way.
Of all the incredible food experiences I had whilst in China, this topped them all hands down.
I’d been longing for something like 小仙女 [Little Fairy] ever since I’d arrived in China. Street food street food. The local stuff. The unregulated stuff. I found out that the rollback on street food restrictions had been temporarily suspended to “clean up” the city for the Chengdu University Games after they’d concluded and food carts started popping back up outside of the tourist hot spots.
Atop a cement square of a park-by-day, open air mobile food carts had set up along the park’s edge, encasing dozens of rickety, fold-away tables and their accompanying plastic stools[!] in the square’s center. At 2am, most every seat was occupied by post-night out, booze-soaked attendees. Slurring, slurping, yelling, laughing, with beers being drunk by the case. During the day, old Chinese nǎinai probably practise Tai Chi on the very spot their grandchildren pass out pissed, while their friends feast around them. It was loud, it was messy and it smelled incredible. Even the air tasted good.
After Ran from Bar RAN Brugge finished his guest shift at Bar Pi we discussed supper with the team at Chinese Room. I showed the photos of 小仙女 on my phone [I had no idea what it was called at the time] and off we set. Plentiful, delicious, chaos with bartenders from four different bars and what felt like a hundred dishes. Fried noodles, fried rice, pig's feet soup, topped oysters, stir fried vegetables, a tonne of meat dishes, iced tea, milk tea, beers, beers and more beers. After everyone had eaten their fill and took their leave I hung around to photograph the cart vendors cooking and serving. Their customers eating and drinking. The constantly rotating, progressively more drunken crowd hadn't slowed down. One of the vendors asked for my WeChat so he could see the photos I took.
I hope he likes them as much as I enjoyed his food.
Every city has a bar like Pollux. There’s a reason it’s nicknamed “The End Of The World.”
Find yourself here past witching hour and your chances of going home before sunrise are slim to none.
Pollux is an institution in Chengdu and Carson, the face, is what we in Australia call a “legend”. But this bar isn’t just a nightly vortex party venue, the cocktails are excellent, the concepts creative and the hospitality rivals that of a bi-annual visit to Grandma's house. Xiaomu and Xiaomi [two very good dogs] are often brought to work by one of the team and the whole place exudes a homely, comfortable energy. It’s a neighbourhood bar. A bartender’s bar. A hard to leave, easy to stay kinda bar.
My first visit to Pollux was on the night I refer to as Noodlegate, with Tim and Edgar, fellow hospoees in town for a Starbucks guest shift [that’s right, there are Starbucks bars in China… and they do guest shifts].
Their prep was done, my shift was over, we were three bars deep and it was late. To Pollux!
Welcome came in the form of a homemade bowl of scallion noodles with egg and pork alongside the Pollux Breakfast Highball; an awesome drink of peanut butter fat-washed bourbon, coconut, white cacao, walnut and bubbles. The bar closed soon after and that’s when the night really kicked off. The six of us took turns rotating through the bar, each making a round of drinks for the others. The serves getting more ridiculous and over the top each time. Daiquiris, Margaritas, Carson’s instant boozey ice-cream, a round of shots, a 5L jug of G&T, a staiquiri of Clockwork Orange… It felt like hanging out in someone's very well-equipped home bar. I dimly remember the power going out? and picking up Xiaomu in an assertive gesture of human to canine dominance.
4am. Time to leave. Drunk [very]. Hungry [again]. More noodles? In hot, spicy soup? Eat it outside in the 30 degree heat? Genius! Carson took us to a little place not far from Pollux. I don’t remember where and I kinda like it that way.
The chilli got all over my face.
Our noses ran in the heat.
Cold beers fought the violent summer humidity and the Sichuan pepper made us all tongue-numb.
What’s not poetic about getting shitfaced and eating a bowl of noodles? We even sat on plastic stools 🥲. I may not remember everything about that night (or taking these photos) but I remember the vibes and the food just fine.
This was one of my favourite nights and only hangover in China. A beautiful, genuine show of hospitality to hospitality. Pollux is a must-visit bar in Chengdu. If you’re ever in town, do yourself a favour and drop in. Go ask Carson where we went for noodles.
knew the month in China would be both challenging and rewarding professionally and personally. The length of stay, unfamiliar systems and culture, weather and language barrier all provided their respective challenges. It felt good to be uncomfortable, I was reassured by it. The Big Thing usually isn’t The Big Thing if it comes easy.
It both pained and quietly thrilled me to be an observer in the land my family came from and I was determined to lift the curtain on the one-sided rhetoric we’re so often subject to in Australia about China.
I have Peddlers to thank for this first touch of the Mainland. A gift so great that thanks will never seem enough. Their trust in the vision of the collaboration and their respect in honouring it appealed them to me as a brand with a human heart. Their drive to challenge the idea of what it means to be “Made in China” was one of the reasons I wanted to work with them in the first place. The desire to usher in a fresh perspective and point of view is one that we share across a myriad of industry standards.
My time in China challenged and delighted me. It demanded I sit up and pay attention, it intimidated me and fulfilled me, humbled and educated me and forced me to adapt and expand in numerous ways.
The best thing about my time here were the people… [and the food… and the bars… and Taobao] I was humbled and awed by the quality of the industry in Chengdu. It is home to some of the most creative and well executed venues any cocktaileur could hope to find anywhere in the world.
There’s alot about this experience I continue to process to this day, a lot I still think about, question, struggle with and want to understand. Leaving China only filled me with the desire to return. To explore more of the country, it’s bars and food, the ties and connection I have here, my family’s history and more.
It’s an understatement to say I look forward to returning in the future.
To say goodbye seems premature and final.
See you again soon is more fitting.
So is thank you, for all that I’ve learned.
Days off in Chengdu were spent exploring the city and keeping a step ahead of the heat.
Photos and moments include; watching a game of Chinese Chess, wontons at Jinli St, a local market alley, lucky dip oysters, Mahjong spotting, more wontons at Jinli St and my favourite window on the way home.
On Saturday the 19th of August, with help from the legendary Tiger from CMYK, Down The Rabbit Hole closed out its one month stint at the Temple House’ Jing Bar. This night signified more than just the last night of the residency. A celebration of the month, the Year of the Rabbit and a poignant goodbye to everyone I’d had the pleasure of meeting. The Jing Bar team were a joy to work with from beginning to end, I miss them all to this day.
On reflection, what can one say.
with thanks to Peddlers Gin Co and Temple House