KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 25 — When Kimchi Lai, 26, was announced the winner of the 2026 Giffard West Cup in Angers, France, on October 1, history was made. 

According to reports, Lai is the first woman to win the competition since it began in 1997 and the second Malaysian champion after David Hans in 2017.

For Lai, it all still feels very surreal. “I never imagined this would happen. It’s been surprising, overwhelming — in a good way — and when people congratulate me, it still doesn’t feel real,” she told Malay Mail, a week after the announcement. 

We were sitting in Reka:Bar, where Lai works, a few hours before her shift that night. “I don’t think I’ve processed all of it yet.”

The night before the final though, everything seemed to point to the opposite of a win. 

A mix-up during the drawing of lots meant Lai was unexpectedly slated to go first among all 19 finalists. “You can imagine the meltdown I had,” she said. “I was crashing out outside the venue; I was crying in my hotel room as T.J., the Giffard brand rep for Malaysia, and my partner Wei comforted me.”

Watching over video call was her coach and mentor, Amanda Wan. “I remember feeling heartbroken that I couldn’t be there for her in person, but I was also annoyed at not being able to smack some sense into her at that moment,” Wan told me over text. 

“I told her everything I wanted her to hear, and I was not the only one telling her many versions of the same thing — that she would be alright, and no matter what the results were, we love her.”

But just one year earlier, Lai wasn’t even a bartender. Not full-time, anyway.

Lai, whose full name is Nicoles Lai Jie Ying, has gone by Kimchi for a long time. 

“My parents had the bright idea of giving their Chinese daughter a French name in a South-east Asian country,” she said. “I very much prefer Kimchi, but I’ve grown to appreciate my name a lot more in the past few years.” 

She has performed poetry since she was 17, though she rarely does these days. After a part-time gig in an ice cream shop led to a first-time encounter with bartending at Pahit in 2022, she spent the next few years working part-time in bars and events while juggling a full-time job translating and interpreting. 

Then, over the span of a couple of months, AI took over all of her translation work. “It was devastating and infuriating in all the worst ways possible,” she said.

She considers herself lucky to have had bartending to fall back on, and says it’s something she genuinely enjoys. 

Many of her peers in the industry — translators, copywriters, transcribers — haven’t been so fortunate. “You blink, and your livelihood is at stake.”

With her translation work gone, Lai left it altogether and went full-time behind the bar. The hands-on nature of the job was a big part of the appeal. 

“It was the main thing,” she said. “I was so frustrated about having no clients in a month. Financially, it was tough, and it made my psyche hell-bent on the next line of work I do being something hands-on. I don’t know, I might’ve become a florist or something.”

AI hasn’t stayed out of her new industry, either. Asked what she makes of it in the food and beverage industry, Lai burst out: “Take photos of your food! Take photos of your drinks! You can’t even do that? I feel like it is bleeding into every single industry, and even though F&B is such a hands-on line of work, it still manifests in the form of menus and social media content … It’s happening, to say the least.”

Hospitality, she says, runs on something else. “The point of hospitality is connection. Hospitality, as an industry — if you chase perfection, it does not function. 

“At its core, you need to be human for connections to happen, for your customers to have a good time, and I think, maybe, we should start taking that into consideration?”

The job has a very human cost, though. “The biggest challenge with this job is how physical it is. I’m not a very fit person,” she laughed. “I’m super unfit. I never liked sports growing up, so the most challenging part is how physically demanding it is. But it fulfils my need to be in a line of work where you get how much you put into it.”

She was a year into bartending full-time and working at Three X Co when she signed up for her first-ever competition. But it was not in search of bragging rights or glory. Lai just wanted a raise.

“I felt that I needed to add value, so I proposed entering this competition, and the response was, ‘Yeah, sure,’ so I went and did it,” she said, laughing.

She chose Giffard because it was familiar: the Giffard West Cup was the first competition she had ever watched, at Reka:Bar in 2022. 

“I wasn’t part of Reka then, but I thought it would be a nice little full-circle moment to join the competition and see what it’s all about. I joined very last-minute; I only submitted the recipe about a day before the deadline, but I’m glad I did.”

The Giffard West Cup is an international bartending and mixology competition established in 1997 and held every two years by French liqueur and syrup producer Giffard. 

The brief for 2026, which remained the same at every stage of the competition, was “Sip the Moments”: two complementary drinks, one for sunrise and one for moonlight.

Desperate for ideas, Lai started with a pair of abstract drinks about intention, named “Love You” and “Mean It.” 

“The first idea I had was super corny; thank goodness I didn’t go with it,” she said, dry-heaving.

Then she looked around her house and landed on a rice cooker, a Chinese New Year gift from her friend Sunny a couple of years earlier. 

She thought about the many stages of rice, and how, from sunrise to moonlight, she “liked to eat rice.” 

That led her to the Chinese idiom sheng mi zhu cheng shu fan (生米煮成熟饭), which means the rice has already been cooked.

It is usually taken to mean that what’s done is done. Lai read it another way: do your best at sunrise, and it’s okay if things don’t turn out by moonlight. “Sometimes the day cooks you.”

“Grain Potential”, her sunrise drink, is a long, stirred highball built on toasted glutinous rice cordial, dry vermouth and soda, with Giffard crème de cassis and a measure of vodka. 

Lai has long liked the nuttiness of toasted glutinous rice powder, a staple of Thai cuisine. “I made a really nice, nutty cordial that lingers in the mouth after each sip,” she said. Toasting the rice by hand is “an extremely smoky ordeal,” and the toasted rice is then sous vide’d in brown sugar syrup and acid-adjusted. The leftover rice is rinsed, dehydrated and used as the garnish.

“You’ll Be All Rice”, for moonlight, starts with rice milk. Lai wanted to know how the fragrance of rice translates into a drink, and her first reference point was horchata. 

“I didn’t want to put cinnamon because that would just be horchata,” she said. Nutmeg gave a poor yield and a bitter aftertaste; cardamom, infused into the milk and blended with ice, worked. 

The finished drink adds sake and vodka, with Giffard rose and coconut syrups, and comes with a cracker made from the same rice milk and a scatter of rose petals.

Wan, now the Beverage Director of Hong Kong’s Tastings Group, had been in Lai’s corner long before the Giffard West Cup. 

“We’ve been friends since 2022, and have worked together on other bartending gigs from time to time,” she told me. 

“When she lost her interpreter job to AI, I asked if she would give full-time bartending a try, and she did. We worked together for a year, so naturally I managed to assist her in her competition.”

She is very familiar with the stage Lai was walking onto. In 2010, Wan became the first woman to represent Malaysia at the Diageo World Class Bartender of the Year finals, and she later reached the global finals of the Peter F. Heering Sling Award in 2015. 

“Kimchi is very determined and resilient, which was great because I could be direct and precise with my feedback to her, knowing she wouldn’t take it personally,” Wan said.

The preparation began with a photoshoot, which Wan says took “an entire village,” then the copy, tweaked back and forth on Google Docs, and finally the routine. 

On their days off, Lai would set up an iPad and phone on a video call and run through her whole set while Wan took notes. They’d discuss what worked, reset the station and go again. 

“From the choice of words, the tone of her voice, and down to the length of every pause, I dare say her entire presentation is now burned into my memory as it is in hers,” Wan said. “There was a lot of yelling and yapping in between, but hey, it worked.”

That set, the same two drinks and the same performance, carried Lai through every stage. 

She won the Malaysian final, then the regional final in Manila, both while working at Three X Co. 

Between Manila and Angers, she moved to Reka:Bar, where both award-winning cocktails are available upon request.

Angers was the third time through.

By the time Lai stepped on stage, she was so tired from crying through the night that she was calm. 

“I shook throughout the Malaysia and regional finals, but I didn’t shake at all during the global final.”

Her years as a performing poet helped, too. Lai enjoys being in front of a crowd, and she says bartending competitions are theatrical by nature, though she has watched that fade in recent years. 

“I think we’re all too afraid or scared to be cringe, to commit to the bit these days,” she said. Her answer was to “be a bit campy, be a bit silly with it, but ultimately tell a story.”

Wan recalled watching from a quiet office, typing her reactions in capital letters and barely containing herself. 

“She landed line after line after line,” she said. “She was worried about going first. By the time she finished her set, we were worried for the rest of the finalists about her going first.”

Lai was announced champion, ahead of runner-up Ketut Masdana of Indonesia and third-placed Liv Rosengren of Spain.

Wan, who had seen her through every step, felt an overwhelming mix of joy, pride and relief, along with “blurry vision.” 

“I know how hard she worked for this and how much she wanted to win. She wanted it, so she did it.”

Standing behind the bar at Reka, Lai reflected on her win with an impassioned plea for the importance of community. 

“Humanity in general is not designed for solitude,” she said, pointing to AI and capitalism as responsible for “an age that is so hell-bent on prying us apart from each other.”

“You don’t have to talk to friends; talk to ChatGPT!” is the pitch, as she hears it. “It’s prying us all apart.”

“If my journey is a good example of anything, it’s that it takes a village,” she said. She is, in her own words, working class, an only child with no generational wealth, on hospitality wages, and she didn’t own a suitcase hardy enough for the travel, with all the prep and perishables. 

Her boss at Reka, Nick, gave her one. Friends and industry peers lent her freezer boxes. 

Two days before her flight, her carry-on broke, and her friend Jo lent her his. Another friend lent her a phone lanyard. 

Elena, a friend outside the industry who didn’t know what to give her as a send-off gift, bejewelled her teeth. Others sat in on practices, gave feedback, filmed her sets and gave up their time.

“None of this is possible if you do this alone. You need people,” she said. “It’s not about not being independent. Sure, I could’ve done this alone, but it would’ve been much harder, and less fulfilling. Because now I have so many people to share this win with; to share this joy with.”

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