Cocktail Daily- Buddha Hand & Mango Sticky Rice Martini | Sodam, Shanghai

Located at 25 Shaoxing Road in Shanghai’s Huangpu District, Sodam is a contemporary cocktail bar built around a single defining ingredient: rice. Since opening in late 2025, the bar has approached rice not as one specific flavor or spirit, but as a broader creative language, breaking down elements such as sake, soju, rice wine, glutinous rice, and toasted rice before reconstructing them within different cocktail formats.The concept emerged as the two founders, coming from different cultural backgrounds, searched for a shared point of reference in their respective food traditions—and ultimately found it in rice.

That philosophy runs throughout the menu. Alongside its signature cocktails, Sodam reinterprets classics through rice-based ingredients, with drinks such as the Sakitini, Rice Soju Old Fashioned, and Rice Daiquiri. The space itself avoids turning the concept into an overt visual theme. Instead, exposed walls, candlelight, and a relaxed soundtrack of hip-hop and R&B create an understated, mature drinking environment. Rather than treating rice as a decorative motif, Sodam uses it as a flexible flavor system that can be continuously reworked and reinterpreted.

The two cocktails featured here reveal two very different sides of that system.

Buddha Hand

Sake / Gin / Bergamot / Elderflower / Rooibos Tea / Jasmine Cheese Foam

Buddha Hand begins with a base of sake and gin, layered with bergamot, elderflower, and rooibos tea before being finished with a generous cap of jasmine cheese foam. Rather than expressing rice through overt sweetness or pronounced grain flavors, the drink uses sake as a clean structural foundation, building complexity through citrus, florals, tea, and creaminess.

Its presentation is equally distinctive. A softly hazy, pale golden drink is served in a simple cylindrical glass beneath a thick layer of white foam, creating two clearly defined textural stages: first the soft, creamy top layer, then the brighter and more refreshing liquid underneath.

This makes Buddha Hand less about identifying individual aromas than about experiencing how aroma and texture unfold together. The jasmine cheese foam gives the opening a rounded, soft impression, while the sake, gin, and tea beneath restore definition and structure. Bergamot and elderflower sit between the two, linking the creamier top layer with the cleaner, more aromatic base.

Tasting Notes

Aroma:
Soft jasmine and creamy aromas lead, followed by the brighter citrus profile of bergamot and the floral lift of elderflower. Rooibos adds a deeper tea character that keeps the nose from becoming purely floral.

Palate:
The first impression is shaped by the substantial foam, giving the drink a smooth, rounded texture. Once through the upper layer, sake and gin bring greater clarity and definition, while bergamot, elderflower, and rooibos gradually emerge. The contrast between the creamy top and the cleaner liquid underneath is one of the drink’s most distinctive structural features.

Finish:
As the creamy texture fades, drier tea notes, citrus, and florals remain, giving the finish a lighter and more restrained character than the opening.

Overall:
What makes Buddha Hand particularly interesting is that it never needs to announce Sodam’s rice theme through an obvious grain-forward flavor. Instead, sake becomes part of the drink’s architecture, while tea, florals, and savory creaminess create a more layered drinking experience. The transition from soft to crisp, and from creamy jasmine to tea and citrus, says more about the drink’s design than any single ingredient on its own.

Mango Sticky Rice Martini

Orange Rice Wine / Gin / Mango / Sticky Rice Pu-erh / Vermouth Blend

If Buddha Hand approaches rice more abstractly, Mango Sticky Rice Martini begins with one of Asia’s most familiar dessert associations: mango sticky rice.

The recipe, however, is not simply a liquid recreation of the dessert. Sodam deconstructs that familiar flavor memory into orange rice wine, gin, mango, sticky rice pu-erh, and a vermouth blend. Beyond the immediate mango-and-sticky-rice reference, tea and aromatized wine introduce additional herbal and botanical dimensions, giving the drink a structure that feels firmly rooted in cocktail form rather than dessert alone.

Orange rice wine extends Sodam’s central rice-driven vocabulary while also bringing citrus and fermented notes into the mix. Mango provides the most immediately recognizable fruit character. Gin and the vermouth blend establish a drier, more botanical backbone, while sticky rice pu-erh sits between them, connecting the fruitiness of mango with the herbal character of the vermouth.

What makes the drink compelling is the way it begins with an instantly recognizable dessert concept and then rebuilds it through rice wine, fruit, tea, and aromatized wine. Rather than directly mimicking the sweetness, richness, and coconut profile of mango sticky rice, it translates the memory of the dessert into the language of a cocktail bar.

Tasting Notes

Aroma:
Ripe mango provides the most immediate tropical fruit character, joined by the citrus tones of the orange rice wine. Behind that, sticky rice pu-erh introduces a tea-like depth, while the vermouth contributes more delicate herbal and spice-driven aromatics.

Palate:
Mango and orange rice wine shape a fruit-forward opening before gin and the vermouth blend gradually introduce a firmer botanical structure. Sticky rice pu-erh bridges the two sides, adding a tea dimension that prevents the drink from becoming a one-note interpretation of a mango dessert.

Finish:
As the fruit recedes, tea, herbs, and the fermented character of the rice wine become more apparent, shifting the finish away from the fullness of mango toward a more mature, tea-driven profile.

Overall:
Mango Sticky Rice Martini captures another side of how Sodam works with rice. It uses a familiar Asian dessert as an immediate point of reference, then breaks it down into rice wine, gin, tea, mango, and vermouth. The concept is easy to understand, but what ultimately gives the drink its structure is not the dessert reference itself—it is the way the different spirits, tea, and fruit elements are recombined.

Taken together, Buddha Hand and Mango Sticky Rice Martini make Sodam’s “All About Rice” philosophy much easier to understand.

One uses sake, florals, tea, and creamy texture to keep rice relatively understated within the structure of the drink. The other begins directly with the familiar image of mango sticky rice, then deconstructs it through orange rice wine, tea, gin, and vermouth.

The two cocktails move in completely different directions, but they are built around the same idea: rice is not a single flavor, but a medium that can be extended, translated, and recombined in many different ways.

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