Where did the name Blue Frog come from?
We took “Kathleen” off of that venue’s name and called it KABB Cafe, which didn’t work. It wasn’t different enough. It confused people. I almost dumped it. [KABB Xintiandi] was keeping us busy and we opened at Seasons Villas. We were really focused on this venue and that venue. Maoming Lu was struggling. I almost let it go for a song, but went away to have a think about it and came back and saw that the street was coming up again. It was coming up more as a bar street. Manhattans had moved in and some other bars had moved in. And I was in a taxi one day thinking of names for a bar and “Blue Frog” popped into my head. Naturally. There’s in place in Tucson, Arizona called Blue Dolphin, I’ve always really liked that name. There’s another place called the Blue Iguana. I thought, “Nobody knows what an iguana us here.” Blue Dog? Blue Frog? So Blue Frog was born. Went in and completely changed the original Kathleen’s into the bar. Made the bar big. The only way to really break with the past a
