A Toy in the Glass

Mad & Midas sounds like it should not work.

A hidden basement bar. A back-alley entrance. Black curtains, 90s music, retro toys, cocktails that come with little surprises. The name sounds like somebody tried to open a cocktail bar inside an arcade machine. The whole thing is one bad decision away from becoming a nostalgia trap for adults who think childhood is a flavour profile. And yet that is exactly why it is interesting.

Mad & Midas is tucked beneath 14 Ann Siang Road at #B1-01, sharing the shophouse with Brooklyn Bar above. The bar's earlier life was upstairs at the now-closed Low Tide on Club Street; it ran pop-ups across the city before settling into the Ann Siang basement. You take a discreet back-alley entrance, a small staircase, and then you are in a retro-cool basement of vintage toys, old-school tunes, and playful drinks. This is not a fashionable kind of seriousness. Good.

Nostalgia as cheap drug

Singapore's cocktail scene has become very good at adult seriousness. We have bars about Japanese restraint, bars about sustainability, bars about agave and rice spirits, bars about Little India, bars about Ginza hospitality, bars about future food, bars about legacy. All of this is useful, and some of it is excellent. But occasionally the scene starts to feel like everyone has submitted a thesis before opening the door. Mad & Midas appears to have submitted a box of toys instead.

That could be terrible. Nostalgia is one of the cheapest drugs in hospitality, and it works fast. Put a few childhood references in a room and people will smile before anything has been earned. The bar does not have to host me properly if the décor already reminds me of something I liked when I was ten. The drink does not have to be great if the garnish makes me laugh. Nostalgia lowers my defences, which is exactly why it should be handled carefully.

The bar is led by Naz Arjuna, twenty-two years deep in Singapore nightlife and previously head bartender at Bitters & Love. The drinks lean into childhood favourites: Panic at the Pisco, a nod to Qoo White Grape; Duck Dive, topped with a savoury chicken-skin crisp; 2pactopus Tepache, a fermented pineapple wine with spices and bitters. Those drinks are useful because they sit in the correct danger zone. Qoo White Grape is not elegant, and that is the point. It is a childhood drink, a convenience-store memory, a little sweet, a little stupid, and instantly legible to anyone who grew up around that flavour universe. Turning that into a pisco drink could become pure gimmick. It could also do something better: take a mass-market childhood taste and give it acid, structure, alcohol, and adult consequences.

That is the line Mad & Midas needs to walk: using childhood as raw material to cook with, rather than as wallpaper.

The Panic at the Pisco

I ordered the drink because the name on the menu pointed at Qoo and I wanted to see how the bar handled the reference.

The cocktail arrived with a small plastic toy at the base of the glass, not glued on, not a souvenir, just sitting there like it belonged. The first sip went through pisco, acid, and an unmistakable hit of grape that was sweeter than expected and then very quickly was not. The bar had not made me drink syrup. It had made me drink a memory that had grown up enough to carry alcohol. The Qoo reference was on the front of the palate; the pisco's grape-skin tannin caught the sweetness on the way down and stopped it from going cloying; a small acid pull (probably a verjus or a half-portion of citric acid) kept the drink moving by the third sip.

What surprised me was how committed the build was to the gag's source. A less serious version would have used the Qoo reference as a starting point and then gone somewhere else, a sour, a fizz, something to dilute the joke into respectability. This drink stayed loyal to its premise. The grape note that anyone in Singapore would recognise was the dominant note on the palate. The toy was already a conversation by the second sip.

Duck Dive carries the same logic in a different register. A chicken-skin crisp on a cocktail is a ridiculous idea, but ridiculous in the right direction. It suggests savouriness, texture, bar-food appetite, and a refusal to make drinks behave too politely. It also suggests that the bar is not only interested in cute sweetness. There is grease in the imagination, and that helps. A bar this playful needs a little grease, otherwise it becomes twee.

What play needs to be hosted

The better version of the bar is not childish but anti-precious, which are not the same thing. Childish would mean the bar had confused innocence with flavour. Anti-precious means it has decided not to perform cocktail dignity all night. Mad & Midas belongs to the second category. It is not trying to be profound. It is not asking me to think hard about regional spirits or admire how cleverly the menu was put together. It is trying to make me loosen up.

There is value in that. Not every bar needs to push cocktails somewhere new. Some bars need to remind people that cocktails are also toys for adults: little machines of colour, memory, sweetness, heat, acid, stupidity, and social permission. A cocktail is also an excuse for behaviour. Mad & Midas seems very aware of the behaviour it wants. It wants people to talk.

That is where the toy gimmick becomes more defensible. A toy with a drink could be cheesy, very easily. It could feel like a forced moment, the kind of prop that makes grown adults say so cute in a voice nobody should use in public. But if the toy gets the table talking, it has done something genuinely bar-like. It has moved me out of passive consumption and into shared silliness. That is hospitality, in its own unserious way.

The room is small and powered by personality. Naz behind the bar, conversation, 90s music, occasional pizza or fish tacos when the kitchen is in the mood. The food side is honestly low-key, since the bar is not pretending to be a restaurant, but enough food arrives to keep the table grounded between rounds. Owner-operated bars have a special kind of voltage because the person behind the bar is not only executing a concept; they are the concept. The room becomes a reflection of their taste, habits, jokes, music, tolerance for chaos, and ability to read people. When it works, the room feels alive in a way polished group bars often struggle to reproduce. When it does not, there is nowhere to hide.

Mad & Midas is one of those rooms, and that is both charm and risk. The charm is obvious: the bar can feel personal, flexible, unscripted, not over-managed. The risk is consistency. A bar built on personality has to keep turning that personality into actual hospitality, because eccentricity on its own does not carry a night, and nostalgia and a hidden address carry it even less. The bartender still has to make the drink properly. The room still has to feel cared for. The jokes still have to land. The guest still has to feel hosted rather than merely exposed to someone else's collection of things.

The friction is real. Some people will find the bar too cute, the toys doing too much, the room too small, the references too on-the-nose. They will not be entirely wrong. The bar also risks becoming a one-visit place, the first visit powered by novelty, with the second harder to justify if the drinks do not hold their own weight. The early signs are that they do. The bar's framing is almost refreshingly basic: a secret cocktail den in Ann Siang with bold drinks and good vibes. No grand manifesto, no claim about reimagining anything. Just hidden, bold, good vibes.

That may be enough. The Singapore cocktail scene sometimes forgets that good vibes is an overused phrase for a genuinely difficult thing. Good vibes mean the room has a social temperature, the staff know when to talk and when to leave me alone, the drinks do not make me feel inadequate, the night gathers itself without anyone announcing that it has gathered. Mad & Midas is betting everything on that. The toys are not the bar. The bar is whether the toys, the 90s music, the basement, and the bartender's twenty-two years combine into permission: permission to stop being impressive for a while, drink something that remembers Qoo, laugh at a stupid object, and let a long-running Singapore bartender do unserious things seriously. The bar does not need to grow up. It just needs to make sure the drinks have.