The Makgeolli Is the Vermouth

BOP opened on the thirty-first of January 2026 at 76 Tras Street, a few doors down from the Jigger & Pony flagship in the Tanjong Pagar stretch now informally known as Korea Town. It is the latest room from the group that gave Singapore Jigger & Pony, Live Twice, Gibson, Caffe Fernet, and the better part of the city's cocktail muscle memory. It is also Uno Jang's first solo-led venue. Seoul-born, in Singapore since 2015, principal bartender at J&P since 2017, promoted to Creative Director and Partner in 2024. The name is a deliberate triple pun: Bartenders of Pony, the team behind it; bap (밥), Korean for rice; and bop, the K-pop sense Uno has spent ten years carrying around.

The Korean grammar is the obvious risk.

Korea is having a long moment. Soju is everywhere, Korean fried chicken is everywhere, Culinary Class Wars alumni and K-drama nightlife scenes are everywhere. A cocktail bar built around Korean spirits and Korean flavour could very easily land as a polished export of a culture that has already been polished and exported many times over. The grammar is too available, the aesthetic too photogenic, the reference points too easy to assemble into a brand.

BOP mostly avoids that fate.

When a concept can become a costume

The bar describes itself as Singapore's first Korean cocktail dining-bar: cocktails lead, and the food, run by J&P Group Executive Chef David Tang in collaboration with consultant Chef Jason Oh of Tak Seoul, is substantial and shareable rather than bar snacks. The cocktail list sits on top of a deep selection of Korean spirits, anchored by soju, makgeolli, cheongju, yakju, takju, and gamhongno, the last a Joseon-era medicinal liquor whose name will probably appear on more Singapore menus over the next eighteen months because BOP has put it back into circulation.

The shophouse is carved into multiple named zones rather than one open floor. The Kki Bar at the front, dark timber and red-painted ceiling, is where the energy concentrates. Behind it sits a skylit middle section in green tiles and ochre. Further back, a quieter lounge with crimson sofas, and a small private nook called the Bojagi Room with tiger artwork referencing Hojak-do folk painting. The palette is built on obangsaek, the Korean five-colour system, and dancheong. Studio Antimatter's Gabriel Tan did the design. Jogakbo patchwork has been reinterpreted as door curtains. The room is researched in a way most "Korean-inspired" rooms in this city are not.

Staff are in preppy varsity jackets. The sound system is festival-grade, 1980s and 1990s K-pop on vinyl. The room is loud-friendly without being airless.

That last distinction matters.

Most "Korean-inspired" cocktail programmes I have encountered, in Singapore and elsewhere, treat Korean ingredients as accent. The drink is fundamentally a Western cocktail. The gochujang is a garnish idea, the makgeolli a substitute for orgeat, the sesame a foam. The flavours get imported, but the way the cocktail is built underneath stays Western.

That is fine, sometimes. It is also limited.

The flavours get imported, but the way the cocktail is built underneath stays Western.

BOP's more interesting move is to put Korean spirits in the load-bearing role. Makgeolli is not just an ingredient in a few drinks; it is the base of an entire vermouth made in-house. Soju is not just a flavouring agent; it is a foundation around which whole drinks are constructed. Gamhongno is not a novelty bottle on the back bar; it is a working component in the Dalgona Iced Coffee. The Korean elements are not visiting the cocktail. The cocktail is visiting them.

That sounds subtle on paper. In the glass, it changes everything.

The BOP Martini

The BOP Martini was the obvious place to start. Makgeolli vermouth sits on the description like a claim, and the question for the bar is whether the words have the build to back them up.

The drink, twenty-three dollars, is built on house-made makgeolli vermouth, Ryu Origin 40 soju, gin, roasted seaweed, takju, and a single soy-pickled olive, olive jangajji, the Korean preserved-vegetable technique applied to a Mediterranean fruit. It arrived very cold, very clear, in a small chilled coupe with the olive resting at the bottom. The first thing I noticed was the colour. Not quite the bone-pale of a London Dry Martini, but a faint cloudiness instead, the kind of soft white-grey that suggested the vermouth was not vermouth in the usual sense. The first sip confirmed it. The drink had Martini structure, cold and dry and alcoholic and sharp at the edges, but the body underneath was wider. There was a rice-fermentation roundness on the palate that no European vermouth produces. The aromatic line was not the bitter-floral wormwood-and-quinine band I expected. It was savoury, lightly toasted, faintly oceanic.

The roasted seaweed was doing the work, and you could taste what the bar is trying to do right there in the glass.

The Martini is one of cocktail culture's most jealously guarded forms. People have opinions. People have rules. Stirred, not shaken. Dry, not wet. Vodka, never. Vodka, always. Twist, olive, both, neither, plus glass shape and dilution and temperature. The form has so much inherited apparatus that any deviation gets read as heresy or gimmick.

BOP's BOP Martini does not feel like either.

It feels like the form being honoured rather than disrespected. The cold is still cold. The dry is still dry. The texture is still narrow and clean. What has changed is what the bitter-aromatic backbone is made of. A Western Martini uses Mediterranean botany; the BOP Martini uses Korean fermentation and Korean seaweed. Same shape, different contents.

That is a real cocktail argument.

The temptation, in a less serious room, would have been to make the Martini look Korean. Add a chilli rim. Add gochujang foam. Add sesame oil. Make the photograph louder than the drink. BOP has done the opposite: the visual is restrained, and the work is in the spirit. That is more honest, and harder.

What Korean drinking culture needs the room to hold

Korean drinking culture, traditionally, is not a cocktail culture. The home format is rounds, shared bottles of soju or makgeolli, glasses refilled by hand, ceremonial pours, communal pacing, food on the table, conversation building across hours. The drink is social before it is a drink. A cocktail bar built around Korean spirits has to make peace with this. Lean too hard into Western cocktail logic, with individual drinks and bartender authorship and technique-forward presentation, and you risk taking spirits out of the social architecture that made them meaningful; the drink becomes correct and lonely. Lean too hard the other way, into communal pours and bottles on the table and no bartender labour, and it stops being a cocktail bar.

BOP's response is to keep both modes alive in the room. The Kki Bar at the front is the counter-drinker's room. The rear lounge with crimson sofas, and the skylit middle section between them, are the round-table rooms. The Bossam, boiled pork with lettuce, perilla, kimchi, garlic, and chilli, is the dish that invites communal pacing. The Iced Somaek, a Cass draft lager topped with shaved soju ice, is the round-friendly drink. The BOP Martini is the counter drink. The zone-based layout is the architectural answer: a bar trying to host both individual cocktail drinking and Korean-style communal drinking has to manage tone carefully, and multiple named rooms instead of one open floor does the work most cocktail bars try to do with vibe and music alone.

The Jigger & Pony Group is the obvious context here.

This is not a scrappy independent room with a thesis and a prayer. It is part of a group that has spent more than a decade learning how to operate cocktail bars at a high standard in Singapore. The bar team, Berry Lim, Basil Wong, Eric Chang, Max Gan, and Brandon Gan, with Betty Sim as assistant principal, was scouted from across the group's existing rooms, including Jigger & Pony, Gibson, and Caffe Fernet. The service is already calibrated. The drink build is already disciplined. The room is polished without being airless, and the bottle stock is serious.

That is an advantage. It is also a hazard.

Group-backed cocktail bars carry a specific risk: they can become competent without being alive. The systems work. The drinks land. The room is full. And yet nothing surprises, and the bar becomes another reliable address in a stable of reliable addresses. That is, in fact, what a lot of group expansion produces in cities like Singapore, a confident chain of cocktail rooms that share the same operational DNA and differ mostly in theme.

BOP has to resist this.

Its concept is specific enough that it ought to feel different from a Jigger & Pony or a Live Twice. The makgeolli vermouth tells me the team is willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of building house ingredients from a non-Western base. The roasted seaweed in a Martini tells me someone in the kitchen and someone behind the bar are talking to each other. The soy-pickled olive tells me the bar is not embarrassed by the small absurdity of cross-cultural quotation, because it has earned the right to it through the rest of the drink. Pop City x Pony, the group's Japanese cocktail bar that opened on Cecil Street in December 2025 with Aki Eguchi as bar director, is the other half of the same expansion strategy. The group is betting that specific beats general.

The risk is that this work becomes one or two signature gestures and the rest of the menu drifts into ordinary cocktails with Korean accents. The Buldak Penicillin, a whisky Penicillin riff with buldak sauce, is the menu's most likely friction point in this regard. The Banana Makolada and the Honey Butter Godfather sit in similar territory. They work as third drinks, less so as second drinks. The danger is that they become the dominant order on a busy Friday and the bar's harder argument, the makgeolli vermouth and the gamhongno and the takju, gets quieter than it should be.

That would be a waste.

The BOP Martini works because it commits all the way through. A bar built on Korean spirits should keep building on Korean spirits, not just at the Martini level but across the room. The deeper the commitment, the harder the project gets, and the more valuable the bar becomes in a city that has many cocktail bars and very few that put non-Western spirits in the spine of the drink rather than at the edge.

The friction is real. BOP will not be for everyone. Guests who do not enjoy makgeolli's rice-fermentation roundness will not be converted by clever drinks. Guests who want a cocktail bar to be a Western cocktail bar with a different colour palette will be mildly disappointed. That is the cost of commitment. But the room reads as a real argument, not a marketing exercise. The drinks are not pretending Korea is an aesthetic. They take Korean spirits, Korean fermentation, and Korean savoury logic, and try to build a cocktail bar around them that does not collapse into either karaoke nostalgia or hotel-bar generic.

The first six months of any concept like this are usually the easiest, because the team is still motivated and the menu is still fresh. What will matter is whether BOP keeps pushing in two years, when the novelty has worn off and the temptation to broaden into more familiar drinks will be strong. I would like the bar to resist that. What it offers right now is a serious challenge to the default assumption that cocktail bar means Western cocktail bar with regional flavours. BOP is not that. It is closer to a cocktail bar built on Korean foundations that has imported Western technique to express them, a small but real grammatical shift.

The BOP Martini makes the case. It is a Martini, and it is also not a Martini. It uses the form to carry materials the form was not designed for, and it does so without apology, gimmick, or the desperate visual signalling that lesser concept bars rely on. A Korean cocktail bar that lets the Korean do the structural work, and lets the cocktail do the rest.