Behind the Laundry

Hao Peng You (which translates to good friends in Mandarin, for which we hope we all become!) Hand Laundry. From the outside, this is a nod to the Chinese Immigrants who had moved to the US in the mid 1800s. With very little opportunity and facing mounting discrimination, hand laundry shops had a lower barrier of entry cost-wise and without the need for fluency in English, they started popping up in San Francisco and started to spread throughout the country.

Once you enter, we designed a space (with a ton of input and help, even construction, from Sherwood, our Bar Director) that was inspired by hidden illicit gambling and opium dens that were often found hidden in the backs of laundries. We were able to score an antique 1800's Chinese Marital Bed from a good friend over at The Villa Riviera (Jennifer Allyn who introduced us to Andrew Rakos), something I was scouring for a long time to find...A LONG TIME. Once these beds fell out of fashion, many were repurposed in Opium Dens, which brings us allllll the way full circle to "Midnight Oil", which was used as a slang term for Opium in the 1800's. The idea here was cozy, intimate, a little bit edgy which also translates to the bar program that Sherwood and I are curating for this experience. These cocktails will all be hand built with a lot of Taiwanese influences, including Peanut Soup, Hey Song Sarsaparilla Soda, Mr. Brown Coffee, Chinese 5 Spice, Oolong Tea, yadda yadda, the list goes on.

We don't want to give away too much and prefer the space and menu to be a bit of a surprise. The cocktails are the focus here, but we put together a fun mix of skewers to throw back to street food in Taiwan