Hidari Chichi and Migi Chichi: The Two Cocktails We Built for Cecilia Gault

There are two cocktails on our menu named after the same person, and a wall in the restaurant with her name in neon on it.

How This Started

I met Cecilia Gault's dad before I met her.

When I did meet her, I asked whether I could buy a poster or something of hers, on the condition that I got to hang it. What arrived later was the poster from her first album, signed to us.

She is an actress and a singer, born in New York, with Japanese and Irish roots. Around here she is Chichi. She kept coming in, and became a regular, and then a friend, which is the part that actually matters and is the reason any of the rest of this exists.

The Drinks

I made two, because she is not one thing.

Hidari Chichi is the ridiculous one. Lychee liqueur, elderflower, Takara shochu and Mio sparkling sake, with edible pink glitter and a dried rosebud on top, in a flute. It is exactly as silly as that sounds. It is also genuinely good, and people order it constantly.

The glitter is not a random flourish. Chichi wears more of it than anyone I have ever met, and if you are going to name a drink after somebody, the drink should look like them.

Migi Chichi is built the way she actually drinks. Five-year aged Mito no Kairakuen umeshu, a little yuzu, a little elderflower, and Okinawan awamori underneath the whole thing. Strong, but nothing that burns going down. Smooth and fruity enough that you will not notice the awamori until later, which is the entire design.

If you want to understand the pair, drink them in that order. One is how she looks walking in. The other is what she orders.

About the Names

Hidari is left and migi is right. Two posters hang on that wall, one on the left and one on the right. That is the explanation, it is completely true, and it is the one we lead with.

Anybody who reads Japanese has already got to the other one. Chichi can mean father. It can also mean breasts. It is her own handle, it is a childish joke, and we are not going to dress it up as anything cleverer.

They Were Not Supposed to Be on the Menu

These were drinks I made for one person when she came in. That was the whole scope.

Then she started putting them on her Instagram stories, and people began turning up and asking for them by name. At some point you stop explaining that a thing is not on the menu and just put it on the menu.

The Wall

After the drinks existed, I asked her to do a photoshoot for them, in collaboration with TEN TEN. The shoot is a story of its own and not this one.

What came out of it was two posters made to look like Japanese beer advertising from the eighties and nineties. They ended up in a room that already has a brick wall covered in genuine Japanese advertising signs from decades earlier, which was not planned and works better than anything we would have planned.

Ayaka made a neon sign reading Chichi's Room, so it stopped being a nickname. A guitar Cecilia signed finished it.

Come Have One

Both are on the cocktail list. Order the pink one if you want the joke, the other one if you want the drink, or both if you want the point.

Sit at that wall while you do it. Almost everything on it was given to us by somebody who decided this place was worth giving something to, and she was one of the first.