This is an official announcement: Ash has won the DeKuyper best bartender in Malaysia contest. We’ve always known that his cocktails were good, but now it’s official. In September he will represent Malaysia (and of course Frangipani) at the International finals in Amsterdam and if he’s not too stoned, he might even have half a chance of making it into the finals of the finals. We don’t want to think about him winning, it would probably mean that we’d have to pay him more.

And what’s the winning concoction, you ask? It’s called Stubborn Blonde and no, Ash is not thinking of bleaching his tresses, the cocktail honours a particularly obdurate customer of the female persuasion. The cocktail is a ginger and lemongrass flavoured tequila brew with an addition of white peach and peach liqueur and it is really quite good, so come and try it. We’ll add it to the list and hopefully the guys behind bars will remember to order enough lemongrass.

It’s a Monday and I’m sitting in the kitchen stewing and I don’t mean that in a good way. I’m fuming! The reason is called “contractor”. The new renovated bar has a stunning round glass bar in it and it took us a while to get the colour right, so our contractor threatened that this might delay the opening and today, the glass has arrived, but the frame IS NOT READY!! This means that we are not opening as planned on Thursday 7th. So to console myself I’m going to go upstairs and unwrap all the gorgeous furniture that the gorgeous guests will be lolling around on (hopefully soon). I’m going to take a few shots and post them, so you can see what I mean and I think you’re going to love the new bar. Guess this gives us time to make a few more new cocktails. Look forward to exotica: Sheherazade; Apple Blush and Albiteqoca will be shaken, stirred and muddled by the best barmen in town.

It’s the morning after and I think, about 50 cocktails ago that we attacked the task of completely re-creating the Frangi cocktail menu. It’s only day three now and I already need to take a break. I’m not saying this isn’t fun, but it’s hard to keep track when you reach cocktail number twenty. After six years of doing this, we’ve worked out a system that seems to keep our natural exuberance in check.

Here’s the problem: You start pretty sober and work your way through the first ten cocktails pretty quick, and even though you don’t actually DRINK any of them (well, most of the time, anyway), you still take a fair number of sips, so when you reach number twenty, everything suddenly starts to taste real good. When that happens, you have to stop and take stock of what you’ve tasted.

And here’s the trick: The next day, you don’t start with new creations, but you retry all the ones you thought were good the day before. Hopefully that’s less than five. You can be sure that today you’ll be eliminating a few more. There basically is a ten percent rule, so create twenty and you end up with two that are worth putting on the menu. It’s a tough job, but we keep bellinis on hand for when we get fed up with the mundane.

Barman Amin says: “Most of our customers like our lychee martini. They go to a lot of other places and they come back and tell me, it’s not the same! The difference is, we’re better than them. We can sell 50 to 60 a night. People just like the finishing, the measure is always right, not too sweet, nice and strong. We put two lychees, but some customers ask for four, or more! We got a lot of sweet things coming here.”

The Frangipani Lychee Martini

40ml vodka
15ml lychee liqueur
60ml lychee syrup
2 lychees
1 cocktail pick

Pour your cocktail glass full of ice and set it in front of you. This ices the glass and makes you look very professional. Put ice into your shaker, add the vodka, lychee liqueur and lychee syrup and gently stir with a cocktail spoon. Doing this very deliberately is actually more impressive than shaking the cocktail. Pour the ice out of your cocktail glass, shake out the water, but don’t wipe the glass (it just makes you look like an old fusspot), put the strainer on your shaker and pour out your perfect Frangipani lychee martini, then stick two lychees on a cocktail pick and drop them into the glass.