Jiro Hsu &
Michael Janczewski

Jiro Hsu: Do you mind if I soak some rice?

Jiro: I really need to start cooking now, because we have to meet some friends later at Bastard. 

Michael Janczewski: It’s based on a dish called husband and wife lung slices. It’s a traditional Sichuanese cold appetiser dish that I’m really fond of. It consists of different parts of braised beef and offal dressed in chilli oil, peanut, sesame, coriander, and celery. It’s meant to be served as a kai wei cai to open up your appetite. 

Michael: It was when I visited Jiro in Dongguan, and the first restaurant we went to was a Sichuanese restaurant. The whole experience of all Sichuanese food in mainland China is very, very different from the Sichuanese restaurants in Hong Kong. I finally got a chance to try the real deal, and I was instantly hooked. It made me fall in love even more with Chinese cooking. I was only familiar with Cantonese cooking, and it really opened my mind to see how much more diverse and different original Chinese food was. 

Michael: It was around 2020, when I was stuck in Hong Kong for a year because of Covid. I did a pop-up at my friend’s place called Cut Sando Sound Bar, which is now called Vivant. It was a sandwich spot, so it was my contribution to them. 

Michael: I’d never lived anywhere besides Poland, and I’d been cooking for quite some time already. I was in a good place in Warsaw, but it was just time to move somewhere else. My tattoo artist told me to go to Hong Kong—it was the best place in the world, he said. Without hesitation, I packed up my stuff and went. I visited first for five, six days, and I was instantly hooked. Half a year later, I started living there.

Michael: On my first trip, I tried to work at a place called Yardbird, but because of visa issues, I couldn’t stay. When I returned to Poland, I actually had an offer to work in Sydney. I got all my documents ready and was about to apply for my Australian visa when a chef from Hong Kong whom I met on my first trip reached out to me. He was opening a new place and asked if I wanted in. I immediately said yes. Hong Kong over Sydney for sure. 

Jiro: I grew up in Guangdong and Taiwan, and then I moved to London where I studied fashion management. I actually wanted to live in Tokyo, but I failed to get a visa. Then an old boss of mine in London introduced me to an internship in Hong Kong, so that’s how I ended up there. 

Jiro: I realised from my internship it would be too boring for me to do fashion jobs in Hong Kong. You would likely end up at major companies like Lane Crawford or Joyce, and it just wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. I had this friend who was working in food and beverage, and I thought this could be interesting for me as well. I started searching for creative agencies, and then I found A Work of Substance, which was the creative agency for Black Sheep. I was hooked by the branding work they did, so I just sent an email to the marketing director and then got a job there. 

Michael: We were introduced by my best friend at Ho Lee Fook, the restaurant I was working at. Jiro was working super close at Chôm Chôm, a restaurant just 50 metres up the hill.  

Jiro: Both restaurants are in the same Black Sheep group. 

Michael: Jiro had a hybrid job working for Black Sheep and working at a Chôm Chôm. She was one of what we called the ‘marketing people’, you know, the office people. 

Jiro: Because they thought we were not doing anything, just sitting there in the office.  

Michael: Correct. I still think so to this day. 

Jiro: We were in the same company, but it was very hard to meet Michael just by going to the restaurant. I was doing communications for Ho Lee Fook at the time, and I would pass the kitchen coming in. I’d say hi to everybody, but there was always only one person that replied.  

Michael: It wasn’t me.  

Jiro: It definitely wasn’t you. But at some point, a lot of young people joined the company, and we all started to hang out after service. Michael’s best friend was gone for a while, so Michael was lonely. He started to come to my restaurant to have a drink after work, and that’s when we saw each other almost every night. 

Jiro: I actually tried to move to Tokyo for a second time, which failed—again. The backup plan was this job in Shanghai. I wanted to open a boutique hotel, but I’d never worked in one. There was an opening in Shanghai at the Middle House by Swire, which also has a very good reputation in Hong Kong, so I took a chance and tried it out. 

Michael: Yeah, Jiro had already moved. No questions asked. But the company we were both working for was planning to open a restaurant in Shanghai similar to the one I was at in Hong Kong. Knowing that Jiro had already moved there, it just made sense to send me over. 

Jiro: I think it’s really hard for me to work in a corporate environment. I’m not used to the system and politics and how long everything takes. If you have new ideas or something, it’s really hard to get them done in a big company.

Jiro: It’s funny, I think I didn’t for a long time. Because why should I be strapped to a physical location, you know? I always thought I could travel anywhere and find a job. It was only after a few years in Shanghai that I realised I have a lot more ideas, but I couldn’t execute them because they were not in line with the branding or the concept of the company. That’s when we were like, ‘We should open our own thing’.  

Michael: But we actually started talking about opening our own restaurant shortly after we started dating. 

Jiro: It’s like a dream, you know? If you’re a chef, your ultimate dream would probably be to open your own restaurant and cook your own food. And Michael has so many ideas, and obviously he can cook. 

Michael: Not yet, no. There was no location. We just knew we were going to do this project. Obviously, the whole concept has changed multiple times throughout the years. Bastard probably would be very different if we were opening it now compared to two years ago. 

Michael: It was on a phone call with Jiro when I was back in Hong Kong in 2020. We just told each other to prepare a list of 10 different potential names for the restaurant we would like to open. It had to describe the style and the food we wanted to do. Back then, I had the idea of doing these flatbreads. It was still supposed to be Chinese and Asian cuisine, but with some Middle Eastern influences—like a Silk Road kind of restaurant. I came up with the name Bastard, and it just instantly caught Jiro’s ear.

Jiro: It’s just really hard to find nice spaces in Shanghai. 

Jiro: Well, for one, we don’t have money.

Michael: I think there are just so few heritage buildings that are actually available for F&B business. The government is just not issuing any licences for them. You then end up with all these newly developed buildings, but there’s no story, there’s no soul in those spaces yet. That really matters a lot for us.  

Michael: It found us. We were approached by the landlord, who liked us because of some pop-ups we had done in some of his properties before. We loved the idea that it was hidden in this alley. It had a bit of a dark, Hong Kong/Japan alley vibe to it. And whatever we’d do would definitely be far from the standard commercial stuff for the masses. The small space suited the limited amount of clientele we would have. 

The most important thing to us was that this building used to be a hostel, a place where people from all around the world would come to stay when they were visiting Shanghai. We translated the hostel into a restaurant where the same thing happens. We have people from all around the world coming and meeting at Bastard in Shanghai. 

Jiro: A big inspiration for the space was Hong Kong, specifically Kowloon Walled City with all those different alleys, neon signs, and the life within those walls. It’s a cyberpunk kind of vibe. You can see it in Bastard in all the metal elements, the broken tiles on the raw walls, the neon and coloured LEDs.

Michael: We were actually deciding between black or magenta tables. We were going back and forth about it with our designer, Akihito Matsushita, but at some point, I was like, ‘We are called Bastard. We might as well go all the way and just be bold. Be aggressive’. Poor Aki, though. We threw so many different ideas at him, I think at some point he just got super confused. 

Jiro: Yeah, in China, oftentimes the designer will be forced to work with some recommendations from the feng shui master the owner finds. Same for us. 

Michael: We had to rearrange the whole kitchen because of the ‘money pillar’. 

Michael: Yeah, a pillar—as in, part of the building. They can calculate where the money pillar is. It can’t be removed, because that’s where all the money is.  

Jiro: Our cash register had to be next to this pillar. 

Michael: So we rearranged the whole kitchen layout. 

Jiro: We had to get these different layout options and show them to our feng shui master. 

The feng shui master said, ‘Where is your door?’ We had to have two doors at Bastard, and we moved one door to be farther from the other, because if they’re too close the money just goes out one door as it comes in from the other. It actually kind of makes sense.

Jiro: The dragon had to face north. And according to the feng shui master, you cannot have two dragons in your house because they will fight each other. 

Michael: But we have more dragons. Two little dragons on the bar shelf that we got from the feng shui master.  

Jiro: That’s OK. That’s three dragons in total. 

Jiro: I think so. There’s, like, a middle person.

Michael: The lockdown was the biggest struggle for us. We signed the lease just before the lockdown started, so we were paying rent throughout that whole time. After the lockdown was lifted, we still had the Zero-Covid Policy, and the rules were changing every day. One day we couldn’t open for dinner, and the next day we were supposed to open only for dinner. Or we could open for dinner, but we couldn’t sell alcohol after 9pm.  

Jiro: Looking back, there were some funny moments, like this alcohol ban situation where officials would just drop in and say you can’t sell or display alcohol. Obviously we have wine bottles everywhere, so we cleared the whole wine shelf and put bottles of San Pellegrino there instead. Then we told everyone to say they were drinking juice. 

Michael: We were putting blankets over the windows, pretending we were not running any business while the restaurant was packed. Everyone was sweating inside. 

Jiro: One of the big surprises for me was when Wong Kar-wai showed up with the whole Blossoms Shanghai cast for a secret dinner. It was definitely unexpected, but I would say I was also manifesting it when I watched the whole series while I was painting the dragon. I think I was really giving that dragon energy.

Jiro: Yeah, a lot of pop-ups. Paris was the first one abroad, at Early June. That one helped us get noticed a lot more.

Jiro: I think it’s also due to luck and very small coincidences that we got invited to those pop-ups. 

Michael: After Bangkok, I think I’m done with these pop-ups. It would be nice to just stay home in Shanghai for a longer time. 

Michael: Yeah, we were looking for a place closer to the restaurant. Well, Jiro wanted to live closer to the restaurant. 

Jiro: And five minutes walking to Manual, our favourite coffee spot. 

Michael: So we’re, like, five minutes closer than we were from our previous place. 

Jiro: Ten minutes, thank you. 

Michael: It was important for us to have a bigger living room where you can either read or listen to music. Now I have the space where I can set up my audio system and enjoy the quality. The bedroom is small because we only just sleep there. And we don’t sleep that much, because we work in F&B. 

Michael: I guess so. It was a requirement when we were looking for apartments that the stairs had to be wide enough to fit these speakers.

Michael: The JBL 4343 signature speakers for jazz lovers. I got hooked on this—let’s call it a hobby, listening to music on good, vintage audio equipment. It’s a common pastime among Hong Kong uncles. They build their man caves somewhere at the far ends of Hong Kong, filled with super good equipment. There, they hang out with their friends while having drinks and singing karaoke together. There’s this famous scene in the movie Infernal Affairs where Andy Lau and Tony Leung’s characters are just sitting and listening to music in one of those shops in Sham Shui Po. That shows how iconic it is in Hong Kong culture. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Sham Shui Po digging for records and looking at all the vintage equipment. I’ve been to different shops listening to different speakers, and I eventually went with these. They sound very warm, very clean, very beautiful. These speakers are going to stick with me for the rest of my life.

Jiro: I don’t know. Maybe the dong xi signs. That’s something I will probably always carry with me, also because of the whole process it took to get them.

Jiro: I was researching neon signs, because I’m obsessed with them. I found this old sifu who does really great calligraphy that’s used for neon signs. I think he designed some signs for some of Wong Kar-wai’s movies. I knew I couldn’t get the neon signs anymore, because it’s really hard to make them, but I thought I could at least get these letters written by him and then just get them cut. Michael was still stuck in Hong Kong, so I told Michael, ‘Dude, you have to find this guy and get this sign before he dies’.  

Michael: I found his shop in North Point, but Jiro hadn’t made up her mind yet about getting the sign. Two weeks later, she wanted it, but then the shop was gone because of Covid. 

Jiro: I had his contact on WeChat and Instagram, so I asked him where he was now. He just gave me a name of some village way up by Yuen Long, and I was like, ‘OK Michael, go there’. 

Michael: He was out somewhere in the mountains where no one goes or comes back from.  

Jiro: So Michael was searching in the heat for two hours trying to find this guy. Nobody in the village knows who the fuck he is because the guy just moved there.  

Michael: After two hours, I was like, ‘I give up. I’m going home’. I went to the minibus that goes to the city, and then I found him there chilling by the street waiting for the same minibus. He’d been waiting for me for two hours and had also just given up. 

Obviously he doesn’t speak any English, and I couldn’t speak any Cantonese. But somehow we made it work. He even shared his newspaper with me, which he was using as a cap against the sun. 

​​Jiro: He tried to sell Michael another letter, which was just this ‘love’ (愛) character. Michael said he didn’t want it, and then the guy just gave it to him. So now we have this extra love character at home together with the dong xi characters. It’s really beautiful calligraphy.​ 

Michael: I guess it doesn’t. 

Jiro: Seven years. Five for Michael. It is our home now, because it’s where Bastard is.  

Michael: And our friends. That’s the biggest part for us. We’re not that attached to Shanghai as a city, but at the same time, it’s the city that brought us all those friends. So it’s still a very special place, I think. 

Jiro: I feel like I’m in Shanghai just to work, for some reason. I think it’s only because of Bastard.

Jiro: I just feel like there’s immense pressure. When you open your own business, it’s not just you who risks losing a job. It’s the whole team. I’d hate to be this person who fails at something that other people depend on, especially after you’ve managed to convince them all to come on board with you. Even if it’s just a job for them, I don’t want to be that person that would be like, ‘I’m sorry, we have to close’. It’s like you didn’t try hard enough. I think that’s why we just work a lot here.  

Michael: You don’t normally stay in a place for seven years if you don’t really like it, right?