Episode 74: The Daijoubu Pop-Up With Caer Maiko and Sharon Yeung 

Bartenders Caer Maiko (DrinkWell, Austin) and Sharon Yeung (The Walrus and the Carpenter, Seattle) organized their first Daijoubu cocktail pop-up four years ago and found ways to keep the self-described “super-Asian cocktail pop-up” going through the pandemic, with events across the country. For this episode, we check in with the Daijoubu duo during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month to talk about Daijoubu’s origins, some of their favorite events and original cocktails over the years, and their work in the Asian American community. 

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PAUL CLARKE

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe Magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. And if you spend any amount of time visiting great cocktail bars and/or following great cocktail bars on Instagram, then at some point you’ve probably come across a bar takeover or pop-up with a bar switching out bartenders and drink menus and music, and sometimes decor and everything else, all in the name of good fun and sometimes a good cause.

For more than four years now, one of the great recurring bar pop-ups has been appearing in cocktail spaces ranging from Texas to the Bay Area to New York City and LA. Created by a pair of bartenders, Sharon Yeung, currently working at The Walrus and The Carpenter in Seattle, and its companion bar Barnacle, and Caer Maiko, currently heading the bar program at Drinkwell in Austin, Texas, the Daijoubu Pop-Up is focused on celebrating the Asian and Asian American experience as told through cocktails, cuisine, music, and pretty much everything you can think of.

Caer and Sharon’s pop-up managed to survive the pandemic with a few creative tweaks. And now, in May of 2023, they’re charging into Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a renewed sense of purpose and energy and with eyes on events and collaborations for the months ahead. For this episode, I’m chatting with Caer Maiko and Sharon Yeung about Daijobu Pop-Up, its organizing idea and mission within the Asian American community, and what to expect when it comes to your town.

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Caer and Sharon, welcome to Radio Imbibe.

SHARON YEUNG

Thank you. 

CAER MAIKO

Happy to be here. 

PAUL CLARKE

For more than four years now, the two of you have been organizing the Daijoubu cocktail pop-up in cities all across the US. For people who haven’t yet experienced the event or haven’t come across you on social media, fill us in. What’s the primary aim behind this series of events? 

SHARON YEUNG

Well, we actually started this because there was a lack of representation in our community in terms of Asian American bartenders and just like the lack of space for our community. So Caer and I met in Austin. We both worked at cocktail bars at the time. And we just wanted to represent our cultures and flavors and transform that into a whole immersive experience. And that turned into a whole thing where it’s, you know, Super Asian cocktails. It’s so much more than cocktails. It’s a whole immersive experience where we’re transforming a space. We are creating a space for Asian Americans in front of and behind the bar. It’s very playful, you know, like we dress up like Sailor Moon.

A lot of our cocktails echo flavors of our childhood. Whether it’s like, you know, desserts we’ve had growing up. And I think that also rings true with the Asian community. They appreciate that, you know, we’re bringing, we’re putting their childhood into a drink. 

PAUL CLARKE

And when you did this first one in Austin a few years ago, was there something about that experience where you said, “Ohh well, we need to keep doing this and maybe other places would be really into it, too”?

CAER MAIKO

Yeah, absolutely. It even started before Sharon and I did that first pop-up. Our very first, what we like to call “Super Asian Cocktail,” was a drink inspired by orange chicken that we entered into the Espolon cocktail fights competition. And we won nationally. And it was like, wow, you can make a drink that tastes like orange chicken sauce and win a national cocktail competition. Maybe we should do some more things that are just this absurd and fun and playful.

But yeah, definitely that first event, to this day, is one of my favorite shifts I’ve ever done. It was the first time that both of us got to write a menu that was all our own drinks and design a space that was all our own space. So many amazing bartenders never get a chance to open their own bar. And this was the closest feeling we had had to that where it was a true representation of who we are as people, as bartenders, as almost like artists. And I think we continue to chase that feeling. 

PAUL CLARKE

And you know, I want to get into the cocktails a little bit more here in a moment. But first off, you know, you’ve mentioned, you know, things like the outfits or the decor. This is more than just doing a menu for a bar for one night. How do you go into a space and kind of rethink it and transform it for the entirety of this event? 

CAER MAIKO

Every possible sensory element we try to change. The idea most American cocktail bars have, like American cocktail culture behind it, and that culture definitely isn’t Asian or Asian American culture, for the most part. So wherever you can fit something Asian, we’re gonna put it there. Decorations are huge, whether it’s lanterns or strings of cherry blossoms. My favorite thing to bring is… My grandparents in Japan are fishermen and we have a giant flag from when they like had their first sail on their new boat. And so we hang that up in the back somewhere. If there’s a television, we’ll have Studio Ghibli or Sailor Moon or Korean dramas, something that we love.

Music, we have an excellent long playlist of all music that is of Asian language from all over Asia, but definitely heavily influence on K-pop. We try to dress up. It’s been from very traditional to very goofy. And then, you know, even at our first pop-up, like, we removed the normal tables and chairs and we put low sitting tables and mats. So people would sit on the ground. Whatever we can do to change the experience from what you expect in your average cocktail bar, we try to do that. 

PAUL CLARKE

And you’ve done all kinds of venues over the course of the years, is that correct? You know, from cocktail bars and kind of speakeasy-style things to clubs, has that given you some flexibility in terms of the kinds of things that you like to tackle and the different ways you’d like to present this? 

SHARON YEUNG

Well, I think it’s, like, the whole fun of it. I mean, Caer and I think we have maybe over 60 original cocktails that we’ve created. And, you know, we like to switch it up every now and then. You know, we’re constantly having all these crazy ideas. And I think having different spaces where we can transform into like a different concept is like the whole fun in it, too. But you know, we’ve done the whole club thing like you said, the whole speakeasy thing.

We bartended out of a little cash bar window and did like a takeout-inspired menu. But when the pandemic hit, we kind of shifted over to do to-go cocktails, for instance. And then Caer was working at a bar called Last Straw. We transformed it into Daijoubu Mart, which is essentially like an Asian, like 7-11 kind of thing. And we’re working alongside food vendors, you know where they can highlight their food items and in turn, like, they’re also making money. You know, it’s like very much like community-focused. 

PAUL CLARKE

And you know, having done this for several years now, are there individual events, individual highlights like some of those you’ve mentioned, that really kind of stand out to you like, that was an amazing time. Either we can never do that again or we should totally do that again? 

CAER MAIKO

I don’t think there’s anything we would not ever do again. Like there’s not, there’s not been a thing I was like, “No! That was a disaster!” But they’re definitely spaces that have been highlights and moments that have been highlights. I am super proud of the work that we did at Daijoubu Mart because it was five weeks of us being able to employ a bunch of people in a time where no one had income.

And we always, at least in my opinion, have a really good time when we’re in the Bay Area or when we’re in Houston. Both of those areas have really amazing cocktail scenes and really strong Asian American community. And so those are our two biggest demographics. And so to have spaces where people really understand craft cocktails and their palate they grew up with is the same as ours, I feel like is the sweet spot of people who are really appreciating and really thankful for the work that we’re doing.

PAUL CLARKE

Now let’s talk about the cocktails for a minute. You mentioned you’ve come up with 50 to 60, or more than that, original drinks for the menus over the years. Is there a central organizing concept or principle if you will, when you start thinking about a particular drink for one of your menus? 

CAER MAIKO

I think there’s a lot of, can we make it more Asian? 

SHARON YEUNG

I think Caer and I have a lot of experience in terms of like classic cocktail bartending. So you know, we have the specs to like, you know, let’s just say like a Martini now. But how can we make them more Asian? And we kind of think about all the components like really thoughtfully. But transform it into really extra way, but very culinary-focused. 

CAER MAIKO

Yeah, we definitely take a lot of inspiration from, uh, like actual Asian cuisine. One of, I think, a lot of Daijoubu fans’ favorite cocktails, the Phuket on Acid, we make a pineapple fried rice syrup and that I think does a really good job. It has the kind of sweeter flavors that most cocktails have. But you have all these savory tones that are able to layer on top of that in a really fun way. And we go far in that direction. Like Sharon makes her own tom kah broth that we pair with the side of mezcal. We’ve done General Tso’s perfect Manhattan, and that orange chicken cocktail we talked about.

And then on the flip side, you have a lot of “Asian cocktails” from bars past like your lychee martinis or Midori sours. You can’t not consider those part of the Asian cocktail pantheon. So we try to take those, but make them actually Asian. Like, Midori is a delicious spirit that can be used correctly. But a lot of us have had it used in spaces where you don’t get to taste all the good parts of it. So there’s definitely that. And then there’s the sweeter side of drinks that already exist in Asia. And it’s hard not to talk about boba tea and fruit teas and things like that because it’s its own genre. And then we’re just able to find ways to add booze to it. 

PAUL CLARKE

And you reach deep into the ingredient catalog when putting these drinks together. You’re taking this kind of culinary framework. But you’re also bringing in Asian spirits like shochu and Taiwanese whiskey to Japanese plum wine, and pretty much any kind of herb or fruit that you might encounter in Asian cuisine. Does this give you an opportunity to maybe serve these kinds of ingredients and flavors in a context that people might not ordinarily encounter them? 

CAER MAIKO

Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a tendency to use a lot of Asian ingredients for their cool X Factor-ness. And I have no problem with people playing with ingredients or not something they used before, like, innovation is huge. Use new things. But the advantage that Sharon and I have when playing with these flavors is like this is the stuff that was in our kitchens growing up. If you talk about, like, a native tongue. like a mother language? This is our mother language for culinary purposes.

So often you’ll see a drink that uses matcha, yuzu or, you know, just one of these very popular Asian flavors. But they won’t necessarily know the history and context for how these are used in Asia or in Asian American communities. And so be able to not only play with those flavors in a way that makes sense with the history, but also me and Sharon’s culinary and cocktail expertise, allowing it to take it to a whole new space and knowing that when you taste baiju, you’re not just tasting spirit, you’re tasting fermented tropical fruits and umami and all these other things. And how do you pull those flavors out of those spirits with all these other ingredients in mind? 

PAUL CLARKE

Now you have these kind of fun, fully immersive cocktail experiences. But there’s always a charity and community connection to these events as well. Is that correct? 

SHARON YEUNG

So we usually donate a portion of each cocktail or you know whether we have like a food item. But it’s usually AAPI local charity. We’ve probably donated more money to Asian Americans’ events and justice because at the height of COVID, there was a necessary need for more of that help, you know, in our Asian community, in terms of support [against] anti-Asian hate. I believe at that time, I think there were third highest anti-Asian hate crimes was in Texas. So we do what we can. 

CAER MAIKO

Yeah, it would feel wrong to be doing a pop-up surrounding Asian identity and Asian American identity, and to not support other Asian Americans, especially now of all times. But yeah, to date, I know we’ve at least donated about $20,000 over the last four years. Pop-ups are very expensive. And once we realize there’s like no way we’re ever going to make enough money from doing this that would actually be impactful in terms of like, it’s not gonna be our full-time job ever. Like shipping this stuff, sending it out there. Bar and restaurant margins are already so slim. And then you add on all the extra stuff we do. We figured, well, if we’re never actually going to make enough money to make this our full-time job, why don’t we just make an impact with people who could really use it whenever we can? 

SHARON YEUNG

Daijoubu is not ginormous, you know. But we have a voice and that we felt like we needed to use our power for the greater good and do as much as we can for the community. 

PAUL CLARKE

And at the time this podcast episode runs, it’ll be early May during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This is typically a busy time for you. What do you have plans not only for May, but on into the summer months that people should know about and keep an eye out for?

CAER MAIKO

May is crazy. I wish we could say yes to even more things. But it always ends up being just a bunch of stuff packed together. I think the first thing I want to mention is, we’re doing a collaborative project with Fairweather Cider in Austin. We can’t necessarily be at every event that we want to be part of. But the great thing about collabs is we can make some stuff and then we can jet off to another event. So we have made a fruit tea-inspired cider with them that they’ll be pouring in their taproom for all of May.

They’ll be also donating a portion of those sales to a local Asian American nonprofit. And they’ll be doing an Asian market event for, I believe, the 6th and 7th where one of our cocktails will be in their frozen machine. We won’t be the ones pouring it. But they’ll still be super Asian and they’re also still donating to our community. 

PAUL CLARKE

Any closing thoughts as we head toward the end of this? 

CAER MAIKO

I hope that all of the very cool things that people ask us to do in May continue to go on throughout the year. I’m sure a lot of people in minority communities experience this thing where you have, like, 20 invites in the month of May and you want to say yes to all of them. But you got to say yes to three. But we hope that the rest of 2023 is full of just as much super Asianness. 

SHARON YEUNG

Yeah, same. I feel like we probably couldn’t have done any of this unless we had such a strong community backing us the entire way. And we’re doing this for them, you know? I’m excited to see what this year has in store for us. I think we’re going to do a lot of cool stuff. 

CAER MAIKO

And we haven’t officially announced it yet, but we will probably be in New York at one point in May. We can’t say more yet. 

PAUL CLARKE

Well, Caer and Sharon, thanks so much for taking the time to share all of this with us. I’m looking forward to seeing both of you at some point soon. 

CAER MAIKO

Thank you for talking to us. 

SHARON YEUNG

Thank you for having us. 

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PAUL CLARKE

Head online to Daijoubupopup.com and to find out more. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes to get there and to check out Daijoubu’s Instagram feed. And that’s it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe to keep up with all of our future episodes. You can find plenty more articles, recipes, and our full back catalog of podcast episodes on our website at imbibemagazine.com. We’ve got your social media needs covered on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and/or digital issues of Imbibe then here’s your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.