What Is Cat Bite Club For?

Cat Bite Club should be annoying.

A hidden bar behind curtains. A neon Cheshire cat. A name that sounds like either a children's gang, a mezcal accident, or a very specific kind of bad decision. A concept built around agave and rice spirits, which means it is permanently in danger of becoming a classroom. Tequila, mezcal, soju, shochu, makgeolli, Mexican reference points, Asian reference points, classic cocktail riffs, obscure bottles, category education, bartender explanations. It could easily turn into one of those bars where I sit down for a drink and end up gently trapped inside someone else's spirits certification. But Cat Bite Club mostly avoids that.

When category becomes classroom

The bar opened in June 2023 at 75 Duxton Road, hidden behind and above Monument Lifestyle cafe, by Gabriel Lowe and Jesse Vida. The two have known each other since age four, and both began bartending in San Francisco in 2007. Vida came to Singapore via The Dead Rabbit in New York and a stint as head bartender at Atlas; Lowe came from bar programmes in Bogotá and a beverage director role at The Standard Bangkok. The concept grew from a gap they saw in the market: agave did not have the space in Singapore that it deserved, and rice spirits gave them a way to connect that world to Asia rather than simply import Mexican drinking culture wholesale. The current collection runs to more than three hundred artisanal distillates split across the two categories.

That sounds like a thesis. Fine, bars are allowed to have theses. The danger is when the thesis becomes more important than the drinking. Cat Bite Club's better move is to make the thesis legible without making it oppressive. The structure is not especially complicated. There are agave drinks. There are rice-spirit drinks. There are classics reworked through those two lenses. Erika Danielle, the head bartender, twenty-five when she took the role, with prior credits at 28 HongKong Street and Low Tide, leads a team of six and has added her own cocktails to the menu (Little Italy, Ode to Ada, the latter named for Ada Coleman, the historic woman bartender).

Familiarity is the entry point. I may not know what to do with a long list of mezcals. I may not have strong feelings about imo shochu. I may not know whether I like rice spirits beyond whatever cheap soju once ruined a night. But I probably know what a Margarita is. I probably understand an Espresso Martini. I probably know what a Negroni is supposed to feel like, even if I cannot explain it. Cat Bite Club uses that existing map, then draws stranger roads through it.

The bar's physical hiding place helps, although hidden bars are very tired now. There was a time when no signage and a curtain could make people feel conspiratorial. That time is mostly over. Singapore has too many secret doors that are not secret. Still, the entrance has enough bluntness to work: find the neon-red Cheshire cat at Monument Lifestyle, go through the heavy curtains, the room appears. The space is minimalist, even intentionally unfinished, with a very direct speakeasy feel. Unfinished is the important word. A bar like this should not feel too designed, because agave and rice spirits already bring enough cultural freight into the room. If the interior overperformed, the whole thing would collapse into theme. The best version of Cat Bite Club is a little rough, a little bottle-led, a little like the room exists because someone had to put these spirits somewhere and start pouring them.

The Cat Bite Margarita

The three-hundred-bottle headline can either impress or exhaust. Nobody normal needs that much agave in front of them unless somebody behind the bar knows how to make the choice feel human.

This is the whole Cat Bite problem. Category bars are dangerous because they often mistake depth for hospitality. The collection becomes the point. The guest is expected to feel grateful for access. The bartender starts explaining differences that may be real, important, and still not what I wanted at nine-thirty after a bad day. A good category bar knows that education should feel like an invitation rather than homework. Cat Bite Club seems to know this, because its hero drink is still the Margarita. After all the rare bottles, rice-spirit pathways, heritage spirits, and educational intent, the drink that moves in serious volume is the Cat Bite Margarita.

I ordered one because the bar's whole argument seemed to depend on whether it could make it.

The drink, twenty-seven dollars, is structurally specific: Código 1530 Blanco Tequila on the base, Siete Misterios Espadín Mezcal cutting in underneath, the smoke present but not theatrical. Cointreau doing the orange work. Fresh citrus, agave nectar, and a sherry move at the back of the palate that gives the whole drink a slightly more adult dryness than I had braced for. It arrived cold, the salt rim sharp at the edges, the colour slightly deeper than a standard Margarita. The second sip went down faster than the first. By the third, I had stopped thinking about whether the bar was right about agave.

What surprised me, on the second drink, a Soju Sprint built around Tokki Soju with peach, honey, mint, citrus, sherry, absinthe, and soda, was how comfortable the bar was using sherry as connecting tissue across categories. Both drinks had sherry doing structural work in the back. That is a small bartending decision but a real one: it gives the rice-spirit list a flavour bridge into the agave list, so a guest moving between the two does not jolt between worlds. The bridge made Tokki feel familiar in a room I was new to. It's the unfussy mechanical work behind what the bar calls introducing its categories.

The Cat Bite Margarita is, in other words, a proper house argument: familiar enough to move quickly, adjusted enough to belong to the room. Tequila and mezcal give it width. Sherry gives it depth. The drink does not need to announce that it is clever. It just needs to make the second one feel obvious.

The translation machine

Cat Bite Club is more than a specialist bar. Its real work is translation. Agave, in Singapore, still carries baggage. For many drinkers, tequila means shots, bad nights, lime wedges, salt, regret, and some uncle's bottle of something terrible. Mezcal has better cultural cachet, but it brings its own clichés: smoke, seriousness, people saying terroir too early in the evening. Rice spirits have the opposite problem. Shochu, soju, awamori, baijiu-adjacent anxieties, sake-adjacent confusion, the category is huge, but most casual drinkers approach it through fragments. Cat Bite Club's job is to make those fragments usable.

That is harder than simply being good at cocktails. A classic cocktail bar can rely on inherited grammar. Cat Bite Club has to take spirits that many guests either misunderstand or under-understand and make them feel obvious in the glass. The menu's structure, each classic approachable through agave or rice, is clever because it does not ask me to abandon what I know. It says: take the drink you understand, now look at it through another spirit. That is not radical. It is practical, and practicality is underrated in cocktail bars.

The menu pushes further with drinks that sound, on paper, like they should not work. Get The MSG? puts chilli-oil-washed Cupreata mezcal with a Szechuan peppercorn-tomato cordial, peach, citrus, and a beer float. Grape Escape runs shochu and gin with a grape shrub, elderflower, gentian, amaro, citrus, and sparkling sake. Corsair is the menu's Old Cuban riff: mezcal, Cointreau, vermouth, malic acid, amaro, carbonation. These are the correct kind of risk. A bar like Cat Bite Club cannot only make polite category introductions forever. It has to let the spirits misbehave, or it becomes a beautiful spirits library with training wheels.

The food understands the same game. The Korean Chicken Al Pastor Quesadilla mirrors Mexican-and-Asian ingredients across a single dish. Tortilla chips and guac. Chilli chicken bao. House pickles. Exactly the kind of bar food the concept needs: not precious, not apologetic, not trying to become a tasting menu. A quesadilla is a useful object. Chicken al pastor is a useful flavour. Korean seasoning gives it another direction.

The name helps too. It undercuts the room's possible self-importance. Cat Bite Club is not dignified, which is good, because dignity would be a disaster here. The agave-and-rice premise could easily turn solemn, especially with two serious bartenders, an ambitious collection, and an obvious educational mission. The cat nonsense keeps the whole thing slightly crooked.

The friction is real. Cat Bite Club's premise is narrow, and narrowness always costs something. If I do not care about agave or rice spirits, the bar has to work harder for me. If I want gin, whisky, or rum to dominate the night, I may feel I am drinking through someone else's obsession. The room has other spirits, but the moral centre is clear. This is not a bar trying to be neutral. The sharper criticism is that category confidence can become category pressure. A guest may feel they ought to order within the concept even when they want something else. The bar has to keep its identity from cornering people into ordering on theme. A strong point of view should clarify the experience, not narrow the guest into obedience.

What makes Cat Bite Club valuable is that it makes unfamiliar spirits feel sociable. It takes categories that could become geeky and exclusionary, and tries to make them drinkable in the most ordinary sense: a Margarita, a spritz, a classic riff, a cold drink when the room is warm, a sharper one when the night has started to mean something. It lets me learn without first admitting ignorance. It lets the bottles be strange without being alienating. The best bars do more than show me what they know. They make me want to know a little more without making the wanting feel like self-improvement. A bar about agave and rice spirits needs expertise. A bar called Cat Bite Club needs the good sense not to get too impressed with itself. So far it has both.