Can Sustainability Be Desirable?

FURA should be unbearable.

A sustainable cocktail bar with a future-food menu, built on insect protein, jellyfish, cultured quail, coffee-free coffee, cell-cultured milk, and low-carbon ingredients. A bar that appears to have looked at the climate crisis, the collapse of food systems, and the general stupidity of human appetite, then decided the correct response was to open on the second floor of 74A Amoy Street in October 2023 and serve drinks about it. The Journal of Future Foods menu, Volume Two of which launched the week of this visit, is framed around planet-friendly options including insect proteins, cell-cultured milk and quail, and coffee-free coffee. This is exactly the kind of concept that can go wrong immediately.

Sustainability is a terrible word for pleasure. It sounds like homework, like someone explaining why the delicious thing I wanted is morally obsolete, like a dinner where the menu has footnotes and the guilt arrives before the first drink. Cocktail bars are already prone to self-importance; add climate anxiety and the whole room can become a TED Talk with garnish. FURA mostly avoids that trap, and that is the achievement.

A food-system project disguised as a bar

The bar is led by Christina Rasmussen and Sasha Wijidessa. The pedigree is almost unfair. Rasmussen, Danish-American and Culinary Institute of America-trained, was formerly head forager at Noma in Copenhagen, and later ran wine programmes at the Ark Collection plant-based group. Wijidessa was Singaporean, on Operation Dagger's founding team in 2014, eventually its head bartender, before moving to Copenhagen in 2019 to join Empirical Spirits' R&D. They met in Copenhagen that year, returned to Singapore together in 2022, co-founded the Mallow pop-up with pastry chef Janice Wong, and opened FURA the following year. Rasmussen is Co-Owner and Head Chef, Wijidessa Co-Owner and Head Bartender. They are a couple, and they run the bar together.

That biography matters because FURA goes well past a bartender's sustainability project. The whole place is a food-system argument wearing a bar's clothes, and that is also what makes it dangerous. A bar can survive a weak concept if the drinks are good. A bar built on this much concept has a harder job, because every drink has to do two things at once. It has to make an argument about the future of consumption, and then it has to shut up and be delicious. The second part is more important. Nobody returns to a bar because the mealworm had a good point.

FURA seems to understand this better than most. The bar works with ingredients like insect proteins, cell-cultured milk, and invasive species such as jellyfish, but the weirdness is kept subtle. The food and drinks are made carefully enough that I could barely notice the mealworms or crickets unless the menu told me. That is the correct hierarchy. The future can be strange, but the drink still has to be good. The worst version of FURA would be a bar that congratulates me for tolerating it. There is a whole genre of sustainable dining that behaves this way: the food is worthy, the drink is worthy, the room is worthy, and everyone leaves a little improved and a little hungry. FURA's smarter move is to refuse the trade-off.

The room helps because it does not look like punishment. Forty seats indoors plus twenty more on an alfresco rooftop herb garden, with a twelve-seat bar counter for a five-course tasting menu Tuesday through Thursday. The materials carry the philosophy without announcing it: oyster-shell coasters, compressed-plywood stools from Plank, lime-wash walls, plant-leather upholstery, lampshades made from red cabbage and coffee husks. The look is futuristic in a slightly strange way, blue and orange and curved, almost aquatic, part bar and part lab. Adaptation describes what FURA is doing better than sustainability does. Sustainability sounds like stopping the damage; adaptation sounds like changing what you want to eat in the first place.

A structural footnote that the rest of the menu rests on: FURA's bug-based items were not actually allowed when the bar opened. The Singapore Food Agency had not yet approved insects for human consumption in October 2023, so the bar's planned bug menu was initially blocked. SFA approved sixteen insect species in July 2024. Dishes like Get The Worm and There's A Bug In My Salad could only legally appear after that. The current Volume Two menu is, in part, the post-legalisation menu, the first iteration FURA has been able to build with the full pantry it had been arguing for since opening.

Get The Worm

FURA's Journal of Future Foods menu runs across three sub-menus on the same evening: the Journal itself (food and signature cocktails); UGLY DELICIOUS (surplus-fruit fermented wines and kombuchas); and FURA, WHO? (classics, spirits, wine for guests who want a more conventional drink without abandoning the room). The food list moves through Jellyfish Ceviche with invasive spotted coral jellyfish on aguachile with caramelised pineapple, A Quail Walks Into A Bar with cell-cultured Japanese quail parfait, Bread & Butter (Ish) with a tallow-byproduct butter candle that doubles as serving theatre, There's A Bug In My Salad with an optional grasshopper crouton, and Pumpkin Layers with locust garum doing the savoury work.

Those names walk a fine line. They are funny but not quite cute. They tell me something strange is coming without collapsing into novelty. That matters because the easiest way to make future food palatable is to turn it into a dare: eat the bug, drink the jellyfish, look how brave we all are. Nobody wants to be applauded for chewing. FURA's better instinct is to normalise the abnormal. Jellyfish becomes ceviche, cultured quail becomes parfait, insect protein becomes salad, tallow becomes a candle that drips into butter. The bar is not asking me to stare directly at the apocalypse. It is saying this may be part of the pantry now, so let us figure out how to make it pleasurable.

I ordered Get The Worm. The Margarita arrived looking almost ordinary: a glass with a slight cloudiness, salt on the rim, a green tinge from the worm-and-aromatics infusion. The first sip went down savoury rather than sweet. The mealworm's contribution was a low umami pulse under the tequila that I would not have placed if the menu had not told me what it was. The lime did its work. The salt did its work. The earthiness that should have been alien held the drink together. By the third sip I had stopped trying to identify the bug and started trying to identify why the drink was as good as it was.

What surprised me, on the second cocktail, Make Local Tomatoes Great Again, a mezcal build on hydroponic tomato fermentation, was how aggressive the umami signature was across the menu. Both drinks landed savoury before they landed bright. That is a real editorial decision. FURA's cocktails are calibrated to flatter savoury proteins (the bug, the quail, the jellyfish) rather than to compete with them. The bar's drinks taste like they were built around food, not designed as separate objects to be admired solo. That is the right calibration for a bar attempting this much pantry rewriting.

The other Volume Two builds work in the same register: 3 Crop Corn at twenty-four (sorghum, corn-silk vermouth, mustard frills); Caviar Papi with vodka, green apple, lemon balm, black-garlic faux caviar, and a kombu ice cream float; the Jellyfish Martini with gin, jellyfish, fish leaf, spirulina, dry vermouth, kombu oil. A mealworm Margarita sounds like the kind of thing a bartender says with too much eye contact. A Jellyfish Martini sounds like either genius or a workplace incident. And yet the names suggest something important: FURA is willing to be silly around serious material. Climate bars can become grim very quickly, treating the future as penitence. FURA treats it as a design problem, a flavour problem, and occasionally a joke. The lightness is doing real work, not just decoration.

Making the system visible

The bar's sustainability runs through sourcing, ingredient use, décor, and the drinks list, well beyond recycling bottles. The kitchen scrutinises crop life cycles, farming methods, carbon sequestration, future-proof ingredients, alternate proteins, and invasive species. The bar uses EcoSpirits batched spirits to cut packaging waste. The house "coffee" alternative is built from malt grains, pu-er tea, hemp, and burdock root, a workable beverage in its own right rather than a polite substitute. The philosophy cites Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, an anthropological text rather than the usual bar-PR reference.

This matters because sustainability branding is easy to fake. Every bar can reduce plastic. Every bar can talk about local produce. Every bar can make a cordial from citrus husks and briefly feel like it has solved capitalism. FURA's project is more ambitious and more exposed. It pushes past how a bar can waste less and into what bars should be serving when the old assumptions about abundance no longer hold. A normal cocktail bar still behaves as if the world is stable: citrus will arrive, coffee will arrive, chocolate will arrive, dairy will arrive, imported spirits will arrive, ice will be made, garnishes will be discarded, and the system underneath the glass stays out of sight. FURA drags that system into view.

The risk is that the pointing becomes the experience. The concept is so strong that I can become overly aware of it. I may find myself evaluating the ethics before the acidity, the future before the finish. Sometimes I want a drink that does not require a position on agricultural resilience. The FURA, WHO? sub-menu is the room's quieter concession to that. A diner who wants a classic Martini can have one without abandoning the room. The bar does not insist on the future-food menu as a condition of entry.

The bar should be careful never to become too virtuous. Virtue is fatal in hospitality, and nobody wants to be hosted by a moral achievement. The warmth and the drink have to come first, and the oddness has to feel like an invitation rather than a correction. If FURA starts making people feel good about themselves before making them feel good, it will have lost the plot. For now, the premise remains sharp. FURA is not asking me to give up pleasure for the planet. It is asking whether pleasure can be redesigned before the planet forces the redesign on everyone anyway. The Get The Worm Margarita was the evidence, and by the third sip the future read as something I would happily order again.