Double Chicken Please is most certainly a bar, but they also consider themselves a creative studio. Which makes sense if you look at their new Free Range cocktail menu, which is reminiscent of a certain Price is Right game. Yes, the very hands-on design has an interactive, Plinko-style element built in.
“It’s a really fun, tangible piece,” says GN Chan, co-founder of Double Chicken Please, which has won acclaim for its culinary-themed cocktails and design aesthetics. “During and after COVID, every menu became a one-pager or a QR code. It’s time to bring something tangible back that you can interact with. It’s really satisfying. It was designed to be fun.”
And fun is a key phrase here. In 2020, GN Chan opened Double Chicken Please in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, right in the midst of a pandemic. A former street magician and industrial designer by training, Chan embarked on his bartending journey by accident with no prior experience or knowledge. He left his native Taiwan for New York on a mission to master his mixology craft. Three years prior, GN and his business partner, Faye Chen, set off in a modified bright yellow 1977 Volkswagen minibus, hosting unique cocktail and dining experiences across the country, earning accolades for their innovative overlap of cuisine and mixology.
That concept found a permanent home under the guise of Double Chicken Please. Even given the pandemic obstacles, the venue soon won a loyal following and, to this day, long lines to get in. The bar’s mission, as they explain, is inspired by the “exploration and experimentation of traditional drinks and dishes in the spirit of hacking design.” To that end, you’ll find amazingly inventive cocktails that deconstruct and redefine classic food dishes into liquid form. The bar also has an in-house design team, which helps develop (among other things) the unusual and highly memorable menu designs.
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The co-founder of New York’s hippest bar takes home the prestigious drinks honor from the 2023 edition of The World’s Best 50 BarsOne highlight of the new menu is Fxxking Little Brain, a mix of tequila, coconut, popcorn, banana and walnut. “The flavor combination is interesting, but it just works,” Chan says, who told us to take special note of the ice, which has half a walnut frozen inside, resembling a brain.
We visited Double Chicken last month to test out the new menu and try a few of these unique cocktail creations (and yes, we let the Plinko game help us decide). You can see that journey here.
As for how Chan and his team come up with these ideas? Credit the diversity of the staff. “We’re a multicultural team,” he says. “When you think of New York, it’s diverse. We opened in the middle of COVID. We needed people and we needed to train them from scratch, so we became a very multicultural space. Even today, we have 35 people from Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, and Central, North and South America. We do a lot of training sessions and team building for people to talk about their background, their culture and how flavor influences them. We put those flavors into the cocktails.”
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