Keefer Bar. Credit: Luis Valdizon

Trend to Table: Qi on the Menu

14 Minute read

13 May 2026

Kiki Aranita

Writer

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Chinese medicinal ingredients are moving from apothecaries and home remedies into cocktails, desserts, and contemporary fine dining.

You’d be forgiven for being unfamiliar with most of Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa’s ingredient list. The traditional Chinese cough syrup contains loquat leaf, Chuan Bei Mu fritillary bulb, platycodon root, and menthol, ingredients more commonly associated with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) than cocktail bars, dessert counters, or fine dining menus. Bitter, herbal, and sweetened heavily with honey, Pei Pa Koa tastes vaguely like medicinal molasses. It’s TCM for beginners, and increasingly, it has become a gateway ingredient introducing Chinese medicinal flavors into restaurants and bars across North America.

At Lucky Danger in Washington, D.C., bar director Sunny Vanavichai uses Pei Pa Koa in Bitter Remedy, a boulevardier variation made with rye, Campari, and sweet vermouth. “I threw in Pei Pa Koa to ease its bitterness, since it has a honey-licorice finish,” she said. Less than a barspoon goes into each pre-batched cocktail, enough to soften the drink without overwhelming it. While it’s Vanavichai’s first time incorporating TCM ingredients into a cocktail, she hopes to expand further. “Ginseng is not cheap. And other Chinese herbs are not easy to find around D.C.,” she said.

Pei Pa Koa has also found new fans through its life behind the bar. “People love it. When they see the bottle of Pei Pa Koa behind the bar, they either know it or they have to ask about it,” Vanavichai said. Vanavichai said. “And if I’m feeling sick, I’ll take a spoonful of it. It also balances you out when you have a hangover,” she laughed. She hopes to continue exploring ingredients tied to both Chinese and Thai apothecary traditions in future cocktails, including jujubes, ginseng, and birds’ nests, all of which appeared on Lucky Danger’s original opening menu.

For the last couple years, I’ve been watching Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa migrate from medicine cabinets into desserts, cafés, and cocktail bars, first across Asia, and now increasingly in North America. Pei Pa Koa-flavored soft serve in Singapore and Malaysia became popular enough to eventually reach Chicago, where Kurimu drizzled the syrup over ice cream last year. In New York, Wuxian Tea folded it into milk tea, transforming a traditional remedy into something closer to a nostalgic flavor profile than a cure.

Beyond the Medicine Cabinet

Keefer Bar in Vancouver’s Chinatown has spent the last fifteen years building cocktails around Chinese apothecary ingredients. They, too, serve a Pei Pa Koa drink called the Antidote, though Pei Pa Koa is among the most familiar ingredients on the menu. On a recent visit, I spotted ginseng, red dates, astragalus, magnolia bark tincture, yun zhi (turkey tail mushrooms), and rhubarb root tincture threaded throughout the cocktail list. TCM ingredients appear in roughly ninety percent of Keefer Bar’s drinks. “We’re very fortunate that we have amazing apothecaries around us,” said beverage director Amber Bruce. Many of the bar’s ingredients come from neighboring herbal shops, especially Continental Herbal, whose owners have spent years teaching Keefer’s bartenders how to work with the ingredients responsibly.

“I rely on the owners, Mickey and Karen,” Bruce said. “The first time I picked up rhubarb root, I was smelling it and thought, ‘It smells so familiar, like the forest floor in the fall, like wet leaves.’ I realized later that rhubarb root shows up in bitters like Campari, aperitivos like Aperol, and many amaros.” Through conversations with apothecary owners, Bruce learned which ingredients and combinations were both effective and safe to use. Travels through Chinatowns from San Francisco to the Philippines further expanded her understanding of Chinese medicinal ingredients and their culinary applications.

“There’s an incredible flavor profile coming through in some of these ingredients that adds so many more dimensions to cocktails,” Bruce said. She pointed to red cardamom, more commonly used in meat stews, which brings an “earthy, pine, camphor, smoky element” to drinks. But experimentation also requires caution. “The possibilities are endless, but it’s important to speak with someone who knows what they’re doing,” she said. Cassia bark can be toxic in high doses, while rhubarb root can have unintended laxative effects. Bruce has also experimented with crickets, seahorse, sea cucumber, and deer velvet, the soft skin that covers growing antlers, which she once turned into a tincture. “I used it like salt and pepper in a cocktail rather than a main ingredient,” she said. “Very much in moderation. It was a little gamey.”

Chinese Culture, Newly Visible

We’re at a curious time in the history of being Chinese. For months, social media feeds have been filled with people declaring, sometimes jokingly, that they’re at “a very Chinese time in my life,” drinking hot water throughout the day, learning mahjong, and embracing Chinese-inspired fashion. Some of it is trend-driven, some of it nostalgic, and some of it reflects a broader curiosity about Chinese culture that feels newly visible in mainstream Western life.

Being Chinese, which I have been all my life, is suddenly cool. Whether or not the trend develops into something more substantial, it has ushered in a new openness toward Chinese ingredients and remedies in places they rarely appeared before, from cocktail bars to contemporary tasting menus.

In Hong Kong, bars have spent the last decade turning nostalgic flavors into cocktails, riffing on childhood staples like yuenyeung, salted plum candies, and White Rabbit sweets. But more recently, that nostalgia has started extending into the medicine cabinet as bars and dessert shops experiment with ingredients like Pei Pa Koa. In Singapore, Synthesis, a TCM-themed bar and restaurant hidden behind an apothecary storefront, builds its entire identity around that intersection of traditional remedies, nostalgia, and contemporary cocktail culture.

TCM is far more expansive than cough syrups and herbal remedies. Rooted in practices developed over thousands of years, Traditional Chinese Medicine encompasses physical therapies like acupuncture and cupping, as well as broader philosophies around balance, nourishment, and qi, the vital energy believed to flow through the body. Though many bars primarily draw from its pantry of roots, barks, and medicinal ingredients, TCM has long shaped the way many Chinese families think about eating and wellness.

To oversimplify a deeply complex concept, qi is the vital energy believed to flow through the body and influenced by the foods we eat. Ingredients like ginger, garlic, cinnamon, hot tea, and beef are considered warming, while cucumbers, watermelon, leafy greens, and green tea are thought to cool the body and restore balance.

Qi may not be widely discussed in most modern restaurant kitchens, but many Chinese children grow up hearing constant reminders about balancing the body through food. I certainly did, learning which ingredients were believed to warm, cool, restore, or replenish depending on what my body supposedly needed at the time.

The Future of Chinese Fine Dining

Perhaps qi will eventually find its way onto more fine dining menus, too. While Chinese cuisine is among the world’s most widespread and influential culinary traditions, Chinese fine dining in the U.S. has often struggled to receive the same level of prestige afforded to other global cuisines. A recent Tatler article noted the irony that Chinese food is simultaneously deeply familiar and narrowly understood, too often associated with comfort and nostalgia rather than ambition or technical refinement. Still, a new generation of chefs is beginning to challenge those assumptions.

Rather than reshaping their cooking to fit European or Japanese fine dining frameworks, many Chinese chefs are instead doubling down on specifically Chinese techniques, flavors, and traditions. One of them is Emily Yuen of New York’s MICHELIN-starred Yingtao.

Yingtao’s tasting menu is defined by precision and balance. It opens with hamachi tucked beneath petals of watermelon radish before moving through refined interpretations of familiar Chinese dishes, including lo mai gai reimagined inside a single chicken wing. Its wontons arrive in a deeply restorative broth layered with goji berries and cordyceps, ingredients long associated with warmth, nourishment, and qi. The soup reminded me of the medicinal broths my aunts would insist I drink whenever I was sick, only far more delicate and delicious.

Osmanthus appears throughout Yingtao’s menu, lending a gentle bitterness to the jelly tucked inside a frozen mandarin pre-dessert and to Her Name Is Jade, a cocktail made with jasmine gin, centerbe, and yuzu.

The meal was paired with Chinese wines poured by China Wine Club, which is working to introduce more of the country’s wineries to U.S. audiences. Bottles from producers like Silver Heights in Ningxia and Canaan Winery in Hebei reflected another rapidly evolving corner of Chinese culinary culture that remains relatively unfamiliar outside China, and even in Hong Kong. Like the medicinal ingredients appearing in cocktails and tasting menus, the wines felt like part of a broader reevaluation of what contemporary Chinese dining can look like.

So perhaps I, too, am at a particularly Chinese moment in my life, seeking out Chinese wines, contemporary Chinese tasting menus, and the medicinal ingredients that have quietly existed around me all along, now finding new life in bars, restaurants, and desserts around the world.