Curated — honest reviews of Singapore’s restaurants, cafés and bars

On a Neil Road bar that translates the behaviours of home into a commercial room without faking it.

On a Sago House Group tropical room that runs tiki, a fixed canon of frozen nostalgia, through a weekly-rotating, market-driven menu instead. The contradiction resolves at the one place tiki and freshness meet: the seasonality of tropical fruit.

On a Bauhaus-styled wine room and cocktail lounge inside a Duxton design hotel: the rare case where the design-hotel bar isn't coasting on the brand, with a cellar deep enough to back the aesthetic, split between a serious upstairs and a sceney downstairs that want different things from you.

On a DUO Galleria room building a fine-dining category for a cuisine that never had one, Malay Archipelago cooking, where a chef trained in the world's most technical kitchens uses that technique to make the archipelago legible, and then makes it disappear.

On a Kampong Glam landmark where the no-menu bespoke cocktail is built from six gins the bar distilled itself, pushing the bespoke idea one step further back, to the base spirit.

On the highest rooftop bar in the city, two hundred and eighty-two metres up, reached by two lifts and presided over by a light sculpture, where the view is so spectacular it stops excusing the ordinary food, drinks and service and starts magnifying them.

On a Dempsey campus where the lab's most-discussed claims show up in two early bites of bread, and on a kitchen that has, two years in, stopped performing the project the press is still performing for it.

On a Jigger & Pony group bar that trades the group's signature restraint for 1980s city-pop maximalism (four zones, neon, a Suntory tie-in) and a savoury shiso sour that proves the drink discipline survives even when the concept goes loud.

On a New Bahru bar built around fermentation, cinema speakers, and a peanut butter wine that sounds like a joke until you taste it.