28 HongKong Street, and the Problem with Being First

The problem with being first is that people stop seeing you clearly. They see the story, the reputation, the door without a sign, the early mythology, the old articles, the recommendation someone whispered to them a decade ago. They see the moment the bar represented rather than the bar still standing in front of them.

28 HongKong Street has had to live with that for years.

It opened on Halloween of 2011 under three founders: Spencer Forhart, Paul Gabie, and Snehal Patel, ex-New York lawyers who had relocated to Singapore in 2007. Michael Callahan, from San Francisco, was the founding general manager and bartender. The bar's success in its first year was the reason its founders started Proof & Company, the spirits and consultancy group that still owns 28 HongKong Street today. Mohamed "Naz" Yazhib became head bartender in mid-2025, the fifth person to hold the role since opening. That is a lot of succession at one address, and it is also why the bar's editorial question has changed.

I went on a Tuesday around half-past-nine, because that is when the room reads most clearly as itself, past the after-work surge and before the late-night Supper Club crowd arrives.

What the room actually does

28 was one of the rooms that taught Singapore how to drink differently. It didn't do it by being precious, or by importing marble and chandeliers and hotel-bar ceremony. It took the early-2000s New York craft cocktail thing, serious drinks and low light and high volume and good spirits with enough hip-hop to keep the room from becoming a seminar, and made it work here. The bar still operates from that template: forty-five-odd seats in a narrow shophouse, no exterior signage, the kind of place that helped Singapore blossom into a cocktail city.

That word speakeasy is a little tired now. It has been abused to death. Every second bar with a hidden entrance thinks it has discovered Prohibition. Most have not discovered anything except poor wayfinding. But 28 got in before the gesture became exhausted. Back then it read less like a theme and more like a room that knew who it was for, and that is the hard thing to preserve. Once a bar becomes important, it gets very easy for it to become boring. Not bad, just boring: competent, admired, professionally maintained, historically meaningful, and dead in the eyes. The drinks keep coming and the bookings keep filling, but the original danger leaves the building.

28's task now is not to prove that it mattered. It did. The more useful question is whether the bar still has a pulse, and the current answer seems to be yes, though not by pretending to be young. That is the smart thing. A lesser version of 28 would panic. It would chase the new rooms, discover fermentation too late, start putting pandan into everything, commission a menu that reads like a grant application for cultural relevance. The bar's recent menus do something more adult. The 2022 Bar Crawl format split the room into four conceptual sub-bars on a single menu, Sin & Misery at the Oldham, Brenda's Bad Hand, Halogen, and the parent 28 HongKong Street, each running a small distinct cocktail set within the same room. The current direction has continued in that register. None of it pretends to be a younger bar's menu. It admits its age and uses age as the material.

The Black Forest Negroni

I ordered the Black Forest Negroni because Naz built it, and because, on the current menu, it is the drink doing the bar's most legible structural work.

The cocktail, twenty-five dollars, is a Negroni rebuilt from the bottom up. Diplomatico Mantuano rum in place of gin. Campari held at the standard proportion. Mancino Rosso vermouth as the sweet vermouth backbone. Taylor's Ruby port folded in to deepen the colour and the dark-fruit register. Cacao nibs steeped through the build. Dried cherries on the side as the garnish that names the drink.

The first sip was the test. The Negroni form was still legible, bitter and round and cold, the Campari doing its structural work. Underneath that, the rum was rounder and warmer than gin would have been. The port pulled the drink darker. The cacao nibs gave the back of the palate a slight chocolate-and-toast note, not so heavy as to turn the cocktail into dessert. The dried cherries did not need to be eaten with the drink to register; their aromatic signal carried first.

This was a Negroni rebuilt by someone who had been making Negronis at this bar for years and had decided what could be moved without breaking the form. A bar that can still rebuild its own classics, without irony and without complacency, is a bar that has not coasted on its legacy. The Black Forest Negroni had pace and drinkability, and it made the second order feel inevitable rather than dutiful.

What surprised me, on the second drink, a Guava Spicy Margarita with pink guava, sour plum, and Carolina reaper chillies behind tequila, was how confidently the bar handled heat at this kind of volume. The capsaicin was present without being a stunt. The guava-and-plum sweetness sat on top long enough for the lime to land before the reaper bite arrived at the back of the throat. A bar making fifty Margaritas on a busy night cannot afford to calibrate chilli loosely. 28's version was calibrated.

What the menu around it does

The other drinks run the same logic at the same standard. The Brass Butterfly, prosecco and melon sencha and gin, is the menu's most legible aperitif move. The Cllub Caffe, cold brew and hazelnut and Buffalo Trace bourbon, is the bar's American Espresso Martini, structurally simpler than most contemporary versions and cleaner for it. The Pickleback Sour from the Brenda's Bad Hand section runs Michter's Rye, Mancino Bianco vermouth, cucumber, dill, and egg white into a sour that is structurally a riff and operationally a drink. The Hue Bluwaiian from Halogen runs Plantation Pineapple rum through coconut, Blue Curaçao, sherry, and lime, a tiki-format drink that does not apologise for being a tiki-format drink. Czech the Method, the bar's long-running whiskey signature, runs Connemara and Green Spot with Becherovka, burnt malt syrup, coffee, and an oatmeal stout pour, a drink that should not work and has worked for years.

The food knows its job: salt, grease, comfort, something to keep the night moving rather than a second concept fighting the first. Chicharrones. Mac & Cheese Balls. The Burger. Chicken Tenders. The late-night Supper Club from Thursday through Saturday runs smash burgers and Maker's Mark highballs or sours at fifteen dollars. That second programme is the bar's clearest editorial bet that its real audience is the second-half-of-the-evening crowd. A bar like this should not suddenly discover tweezers. It should feed people like it understands drinking. 28 still does.

The friction is real. I cannot walk into 28 as a neutral guest anymore. The name arrives before the drink. The room has been recommended too many times by too many people who care too much about bars, and that kind of admiration can make a place feel slightly pre-judged. The bigger risk is that the bar becomes trapped in being reliable, which is valuable right up until it turns into a sedative. Institutions survive by being dependable, but they stay interesting only if there is still some mischief left in the system. The current menu structure suggests 28 understands this. Preserving the classics is not enough on its own; the new drinks have to talk back.

28 HongKong Street is no longer surprising in the way it once was. It cannot be. The scene caught up, splintered, globalised, professionalised, and in some cases overtook the old grammar. The hidden door is no longer enough. The New York reference is no longer exotic. The idea of Singapore as a cocktail city no longer needs defending. So the bar's job has changed. It does not need to be the future anymore. It needs to be alive in the present, which is a less glamorous task and probably a harder one. Plenty of bars can arrive with a point of view. Fewer can keep one after the world around them has absorbed it. 28 now sits in that strange middle age where it has to be judged neither as a hot new room nor as a sacred old one, but simply as a bar.

The Black Forest Negroni, on the Tuesday I ate the cherries off the rim, was the evidence that the bar is still the second thing rather than the third.