There was a time when William Tsui, co-owner and beverage director of Oakland’s Viridian, groaned at the thought of making a lychee martini. He shook up countless orders of the sweet, potent drinks more than a decade ago for a cast of neighborhood regulars at a family-style American Chinese restaurant in Berkeley. “They’re such a relic from the dark ages of bartending,” Tsui says.
More recently, however, Tsui’s come to appreciate the luscious, floral fruit’s potential as a cocktail ingredient. “Lychee is a wonderful flavor to play with,” he says. And despite its tepid reputation in the cocktail canon, the fruit is “a very nostalgic part of my bartending experience,” Tsui says. “Bringing it back to the forefront of craft cocktails is a kind of homage to my baby bartender days.”
As a motif of Lunar New Year, with its promise of good fortune, lychee is the foundational flavor of Tsui’s latest large-format cocktail. His Lunar New Year punch features the fruit threefold, using the syrup from canned lychee, lychee liqueur, and whole fruits. Festively fizzy and eminently shareable, the punch embodies the ethos of Viridian’s Red Envelope pop-up, annually hosted by and for young Asian Americans from across the diaspora. The party, which takes place under a 60-foot ceiling-mounted dragon, Tsui quips, is a “little cooler and a little edgier” than the Lunar New Years classically rung in at your auntie or grandma’s house.
This Lunar New Year, usher some of that lucky spirit into your home with Tsui’s punch. The recipe plays on the fruit’s distinctive flavor by combining canned lychee syrup with lime, grapefruit juice, a citrus-forward gin, sparkling wine, and both elderflower and lychee liqueurs. Lime juice offers an acidic contrast to the aromatic lychee syrup, while sparkling wine—the drier the better—rounds out the mix with a bubbly backbone. Elderflower liqueur, like St-Germain, is a “no-brainer” addition, Tsui says, amping up the floral notes inherent to lychee. And grapefruit juice complements the gin while providing a welcome foil to sweet lychee syrup—plus a pretty pink hue.
The punch couldn’t be easier to make. Just toss everything in the bowl with ice and give it a swirl. You’ll finish with plenty of whole lychee fruit; they’ll bob across the surface like buoys in the sea. While lychee liqueur (try Giffard Lichi-Li) is on the more niche end of the spirits spectrum, its flowery versatility makes it a lively addition to your bar cart. Splash any leftovers into a flute of sparkling wine, Tsui suggests, or shake it into a margarita in place of Cointreau or orange curacao.