Adam and his partner, Gemma are those rarest of things, genuine oddballs. We caught up with them at their bar in Surry Hills, Bad Mama for a chat.

Bad Mama is an evolution of the famous Mamasan, the place that Adam and Gemma first opened in Bondi. 

"Mamasan was a restaurant with a bar attached. Bad Mama is a bar with a restaurant attached," Adam tells us.

They've been putting the place together over the last few months, fussing over the tiniest details.

"We're both a bit nuts when it comes to this stuff," Adam says, while balancing on a ladder, attaching branches and twigs around Gemma's paintings on the ceiling, "If we take on something, we go all in. No half measures."

The branches and twigs are from a dead tree that Adam drove to a national park at four in the morning to pick up.

"They look like creepy hands," he explains, showing us a gnarly twig, "I thought they'd go well with the art. Need to add some fairy lights later and then we'll be done."

Adam and Gemma will think up an idea and then do whatever it takes to execute it. Some work out, some don't. And that's half the fun of it.

Gemma reckons the place is about sixty percent done. She's currently painting Japanese ghosts and samurai in the toilets, having finished the ceiling a few days ago.

We've caught them smack in the middle of their transition from Mamasan to Bad Mama, so the place is bursting with ideas and new additions.

Adam tells us they're like a creative team, "When I was in advertising, I had my writer, Ben, to jam with. Now it's Gemma."

Mamasan was a real labour of love, and Bad Mama is no different. Spread across three levels, it's a wonderland of imagination and play, with Japanese rain gods; actual train tracks on the walls; a bar made from a dinghy; a steering wheel from Fury Road; a cherry blossom ceiling; a box of Adam's outdated technology; another box of his Astroboy collection; Gemma's grandmother's shoes, the last pair that were made for bound feet in Taiwan; even the Buddhist God of drinking with his own impressive shrine.

Pretty much everything is recycled in here, and some of the stuff looks like it weighs a tonne, leaving us wondering how on earth they got it up on the walls. They tell us they plan on putting a little plaque next to each one with its individual story on it.

We ask how they met. Gemma tells us she was really drunk the day she met Adam, or she wouldn't have gone out with him. Adam agrees, saying she was way out of his league. He tells us she thought he was gay. Gemma adds that she thought all creatives were gay.

Adam left advertising to start Mamasan a decade ago. He used his Lions and Pencils as door stoppers, but then someone stole them.

"What kind of idiot steals an advertising award?" he asks us.

He's still an occasional whore in Satan's circus, his words not ours, but it's mostly to work on stuff that matters, like Suicide Awareness and Voluntary Euthanasia Laws, and usually ends up being a huge success.

Adam and Gemma live in Gemma’s beautiful rustic fishing village called Yehliu. They plan on opening something similar to Bad Mama in Taiwan soon.

"Taiwan's got loads of brilliant food places, the best in the world, but there's still space for nicely done bars," Adam tells us.

"You'll have to come," he adds, showing us a video of the view from their place. We're thinking about it when he shows us a video of the local food. Sold.