[Three Drinks with] Ting Ting of TaKo (and Riink and More, More, More)

Three Drinks is an ongoing article series in which we raise a glass with Shanghai's most interesting bar owners, bartenders, mixologists, movers, mixers and shakers. The premise is simple: We ask them to create three cocktails of their choice and then give us a bit of chat about them in particular and life in general. And... we drink them of course. Cheers!

Her 13-year journey in the Shanghai bar biz has led Ting Ting through the city's most unique and individualist concepts– Inferno, Riink, Hepkat, Roxie – to her latest venture, TaKo, a lovely new bar that assumes the space of the old Roxie on Shaanxi Road N.

TaKo is actually that: tattoos and cocktails (but not tacos). The venue hosts local Shanghai tattoo and piercing artists at their salon at the front of the spot by appointment, while the rest of the space is a chilled-out club, community space, and cocktail lounge that serves up 10 seriously great craft cocktail creations.

If you're missing Roxie vibes, don't worry, they still carry over. But seriously, the drinks are reason enough to make a beeline for her new bar.

We went down for three:

Mary Not Bloody

It's like a bright, light Bloody Mary with a little kick. Immensely smash-able. Simple and delicious. Could re-order like four of these. Maybe like a Crystal Pepsi version of a Bloody Mary but we mean that in a good way.

Ting Ting: Yeah, we're doing tattoos and cocktails. The tattoos are by appointment, and we have four artists – three tattooists and one piercing artist. It's not a new concept – drinks and tattoos – but we wanted to do our own version.

Everything is going to be by appointment. You know, everything has to be really safe. We're working with Dazhong, an old-school Shanghai tattooist that's been working for 20 years. He comes from a fine art background, so he's really good with pencils – sketchy but with really clean lines. Lisa, another one of our artists, has been in the industry for 15 years herself. She does lots of different styles. And Lion, our piercing artist, is also really well-known in Shanghai. Price ranges are 1,500-2,000 yuan an hour, depending on the artist. And piercings are by the job.

But these are all friends that I've known for some time, and we always wanted to work on something together. We're lucky to have that chance now.

For the "Mary Not Bloody," because we clarified the juice, we can use five different types of tomatoes. So it's a clarified, very clean taste. I mean, in a sense, it's a more low-calorie. Because all the hard stuff is not in there.

I think tweaking classics is always a smart thing to do. But don't tweak it until it's like completely something different. We're kind of challenging, I think, the original taste a little bit. And then the logic is that you use better ingredients.

The Pico Sour

Ahhh, A fresh and easy one with some nice elderflower notes that we're seeing in a lot of drinks around town. A warmer sort of variation with the fig jam giving it a deep berry/honey sort of flavor. Right on.

I just want to do amazing drinks, you know? Because that's what we sell. I mean, there's nothing else that we really sell, to be honest, you know? Just make that really good, really straightforward but with lots of character. I think the whole combination of the menu is... have a little bit of everything.

The Pisco Sour is fig jam. Homemade fig jam with pisco and some elderflower. It's a little bit floral. It's a very complex drink because I've never really made homemade jam.

So it's actually a few processes together. You have to really let it melt to a certain degree. You cannot really ice it.

I think one of the ingredients in all the drinks, or at least one of the ingredients in all of the drinks, is made fresh. The Pisco Sour would be the fig that is like worked from nothing. It's also a fruit that I never really understood, so it took some time to get there.

Old Fashioned Gone Bananas

A super smooth old fashion with a lovely banana, caramel sort of finish. Beautifully sweet and strong.

We grilled the bananas, and I always wanted to learn how to fat-wash things. So we use pure butter. We bake the fresh bananas into the butter, and the banana caramelizes. It makes it smoother. That's what the whole thing is. Then, you put it in the Bourbon. And then that will be your fat-washed banana whiskey. And it's properly infused.

Then you filter the whole thing. It's a lot of steps.

We put other things in there because an Old Fashioned also has bitters. We put a bit more fennel in it as well as licorice.

The banana is nice because it's not predominant, but still there.

Off the record, I like bananas a lot.

So the tattoos bring the culture side to it, but our main business is the bar and specifically the cocktails. I mean, at the end of the day, this place is about intensely wanting to do self-expression. So for the artists, that's through their work. And for us, it's the drinks. The community focuses on events – art shows, talks and things. We're bringing people together in a place where they can be themselves. And I feel it's sort of the culmination of all the stuff we've done in Shanghai (Inferno, Riinkk, Hepkat, Roxie), like this is where we are now from where we were coming from.

In Shanghai, it's such a busy city, and everyone's running through their day working, focusing on what we need to do rather than what we want to do. So this place is just about what we want to do and how we want to express ourselves.

But I feel like I kind of owe it to myself. Yeah, to do something for yourself.

If you go:

Opening hours:

Address: 2/F, 359 Kangding Rd, near Shaanxi Rd N.

For tattoos and piercing inquiries, add WeChat: takobooking.