Bar Bon Funk Means It

Bar Bon Funk should be exhausting.

The name alone is a small warning. Funk is one of those words bars love and guests have started to suspect. It implies ferment, smell, fungus, mould, body, weight, and a slightly unwashed kind of pleasure. It is supposed to make wine and drink writers feel adventurous. Most of the time, when a bar uses the word seriously, the bar is either very good or wildly self-indulgent, rarely in between.

Bar Bon Funk opened on the fifteenth of August 2024 on the second floor of New Bahru, the cluster of food and drink rooms in the old Nan Chiau High School building off River Valley. It is the third venue in The Lo & Behold Group's Bon Funk family, chef-owner Keirin Buck's third room after Le Bon Funk on Club Street and Le Bon Funk in Holland Village. The original Le Bon Funk taught a generation of Singapore drinkers what funky actually meant outside Instagram. The cocktail bar is its third sibling, with head barman Josiah Chee, formerly of Jigger & Pony, 28 HongKong Street, and Employees Only Singapore, running the floor, and Ryan Newman, formerly of the Le Bon Funk kitchen, running the food. This is the kind of pedigree that can become a trap. Pedigree raises the price of seriousness. A bar with this lineage cannot show up with a tidy menu of safe drinks and a nodding reference to fermentation. It has to actually do the work, and the work means treating funk as something you make rather than something you say.

The annoying thing is that, on the night I sat down, it mostly does.

When funk becomes a slogan

The word funk has been having a slow, unflattering decade in drinks. It was once useful shorthand for what a particular kind of unfiltered, lightly oxidative, low-intervention wine tasted like. Then it began to migrate. Beer borrowed it, cocktail bars borrowed it, coffee roasters borrowed it. By the mid-2020s, funky was a marketing adjective for anything slightly weird, slightly off-grid, slightly proud of its own bacteria. This is the cost of a good word becoming a popular word: the thing it described stops being a description and becomes a brand.

A bar that puts funk in its name has to negotiate that legacy. It can lean in cynically, adopting the aesthetic, selling the vibe, serving drinks that are not actually fermented in any meaningful way but feel adventurous enough to justify the name. Or it can lean in earnestly, which is much harder, because earnestness in this context requires actual production work: ferments that take time, ingredients that risk spoiling, house infusions that fail half the time, and drinks that may not always look pretty on a phone. Bar Bon Funk has chosen the harder version.

That choice is visible on the bar itself. The front room is built around a breeze-block bar topped with yellow marble, with records propped along its surface as both display and library. Behind it sits a pair of repurposed Altec A5 cinema speakers, vintage McIntosh amps, a turntable, and a custom mixer. The bar was, by Buck's own account, designed around the speakers rather than the other way around, an unusual ordering that says something about which part of the room is the spine. A lounge zone behind the bar has red linoleum-topped tables and Thonet tubular chairs. A ten-seat private dining room behind that runs a Nakamichi cassette deck and custom Berlin-built speakers. Forty-seven seats. The bartenders move like cooks. The drink list reads like a fermentation programme rather than a flavour calendar, eight reworked classics and eight signatures, rotating every three to six months.

This can be off-putting depending on what I came for. A guest expecting cocktail-bar polish will find the room slightly cooler than that. A guest expecting wine-bar comfort will find a more drinks-led, more bartender-driven environment. The bar sits in a particular middle space: too built-for-drinking to be a wine bar, too ingredient-led and savoury to be a standard cocktail bar. The whole concept works that seam, and you either go with it or you do not.

The Peanut Butter Wine and the house Negroni

I ordered the Peanut Butter Wine because the words on the menu sounded almost obviously stupid.

The drink, twenty-six dollars, is built on peanut butter, lacto-fermented strawberry honey, and verjus. On paper this reads like a list of ideas someone has assembled to provoke. Peanut butter. Honey. Verjus. The combination sounds either like an experimental pastry course or a punishment.

What arrived was small, slightly cloudy, served in a wine glass, with no visible garnish. The first sip landed in the savoury part of my mouth before the sweet part. That was the surprise. The drink did not behave like a dessert cocktail. The peanut butter presence was there, but it was not the sticky, sugary peanut butter of childhood toast. It was the roasted, nutty, faintly oily peanut butter of a serious snack. The fermented strawberry honey did not arrive as fruit. It arrived as a sour-floral pull on the back of the palate, more like a barely-aged jam than a syrup. The verjus held the whole thing together with a clean, slightly green acidity that kept the drink from collapsing into nut butter. The second sip went down faster than the first.

A drink like this lives or dies on one thing. Anyone can build a peanut butter wine that is impressive. Far fewer bars can build one that is drinkable. The line between interesting and finishable is exactly where most novelty drinks fail. A Peanut Butter Wine that I want a second sip of is a real cocktail. A Peanut Butter Wine that I admire and then leave is a stunt. Bar Bon Funk's version is the first kind, mostly because the bar has done the boring work behind the obvious idea: the strawberry honey is lacto-fermented in-house, the verjus is doing structural work rather than flavour-trick work, and the peanut butter is built into the drink at proportions that read as cocktail rather than as parlour trick.

The Negroni makes the quieter case. The house version, twenty-eight dollars, runs West Winds Cutlass Gin, Bon Funk Amaro, and Bon Funk Vermouth, the amaro and vermouth both made in-house and both ultrasonically aged with charred American oak. That is the structural fact most bars cannot match. Most rooms that put funk on a menu still buy their amaro and vermouth from the suppliers everyone else uses. Bar Bon Funk builds its own. The Negroni I drank was built from components the bar had made itself, and the Negroni is the place where this shows because it is the format least forgiving of cheating. Three equal ingredients. Nowhere to hide. The drink was structurally settled, slightly more oaked than the standard, with a bitterness that read closer to amaretto territory than to Campari's usual gentian bite. That is not a stunt. That is a working method.

What surprised me, between the two drinks, was the temperature handling on the Peanut Butter Wine. The drink had been built and held at a slightly warmer temperature than the Negroni, closer to a cellar wine than to a chilled cocktail, which let the verjus's green acidity come forward without numbing it. A colder build would have muted the savoury thread. The bar had thought about thermal calibration as a cocktail variable, not just as a serving convention. That is the kind of small back-of-house decision that distinguishes a real fermentation programme from a styled one.

What the method costs

A funk-and-ferment-led programme will not work for every guest. Some palates will find the savoury, bready, slightly oxidative direction unpleasant. Some will want their cocktails brighter, cleaner, and less narrative. The drinks here are emotionally specific. They lean toward the umami-savoury end of the cocktail register. They are happiest with food. They reward slow drinking and punish the assumption that the second drink should be more of the same. If I arrive at Bar Bon Funk wanting a textbook gin and tonic, I can have one. But the room is not built for that order. It is built for the drinks that took someone weeks to develop, and it wants me to engage with that work rather than bypass it.

The food is integral, not optional. Newman's kitchen runs a real menu. The Baloney Sandwich, housemade mortadella-style sausage, fluffy buns, melted cheese, pickle dills, Calabrian peppers, chips, is the dish I would order if someone asked me to explain the room. Fried Tripe with parsnip and zucchini. Parisian Gnocchi with white corn and chanterelles. Pickled Egg with English mustard and dill pollen. The plates are produce-led, slightly funky themselves, and matter as much as the drinks. The bar would not work as a drinks-only operation, and the fact that it does not pretend to is part of why the room holds together.

The friction is in the format more than in the drinks. Bar Bon Funk is asking for a particular kind of attention from its guests: to slow down, read the menu carefully, accept that some drinks will not behave the way cocktails usually behave, and trust that the funky note on a glass is a feature rather than a warning. Some guests are not in the mood for this. Some never will be. That is the price of a real concept. There is also the question of pace. Heavy-fermentation programmes are slow to make and unforgiving in service. A bartender cannot just pour faster when the room fills up. The ingredients are what they are. The drinks are built the way they are built. If the bar gets popular faster than its production can scale, the room either has to compromise the drinks or accept slower service.

The longer-term challenge is more interesting. A bar built around fermentation has to keep its programme moving. The ingredients have seasons. The infusions have lifespans. The ferments are alive and will not stay still. That means the menu cannot become static. New drinks have to keep coming as old ferments run out and new ones come into rotation. The published rhythm of refreshing every three to six months is the correct cadence. Whether the bar can hold that cadence over years is the test.

Singapore has plenty of polished cocktail bars. It has plenty of concept bars. What it has had less of is a bar built around method, around the actual production discipline of fermentation, washing, infusion, ultrasonic ageing, and house-built ingredients, that is willing to put that work at the visible centre of the room. Bar Bon Funk is that bar. The drinks are good not because they are clever, but because they have been made. The Peanut Butter Wine is not a stunt. The Negroni is not bought. Both are the visible end of a longer, less photogenic process happening on the counter and in the back. The bar is asking me to value that process even when I cannot see all of it. That is an old, useful argument for cocktail culture: the drinks that survive are the ones a bar genuinely built rather than simply assembled. Bar Bon Funk is on the building side of that line. The funk and the fermentation are real, the amaro and the vermouth are made in-house, and the drinks are built to be drunk rather than photographed. The bargain it offers is straightforward: I drink the result, and the bar does the long, unglamorous work behind it.