A Painting You Can Drink In

Night Hawk is almost too designed.

Not badly designed. The opposite. The room is so considered that I started distrusting it on sight. Green marble at the bar with black-marble curved-edge counters, red leather wall panels in timber framing, a mirrored ceiling, amber globe lamps, light honey leather seating, an amber-tinted capsule porthole through to the Five Oars café next door. No clocks. No windows to the street. The whole compact twenty-five-seat space arranged like someone took Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, ran it through The Jetsons and a little Blade Runner, and decided one small room was enough for loneliness to become a bar.

That should be annoying. A bar inspired by Nighthawks is dangerous for obvious reasons. Hopper's painting is already one of the most over-interpreted images of urban solitude in modern culture. Put it into a cocktail bar and the risk is immediate: atmosphere ahead of hospitality, the mood arriving before the drink. I do not want to feel like I have entered a painting. I want to feel like someone knows what to pour me.

The interesting thing about Night Hawk is that the bar understands the danger and has built itself directly inside it. The room makes the loud claim and the drinks have to answer for it. Whether they manage that depends on whether the kitchen at the back of a twenty-five-seat space at 43 Tanjong Pagar Road can make cocktails that earn the room's confidence rather than drown in it.

A mood bar

The bar opened in 2022 under Peter Chua and Will Leow, through their Composed Concepts group, the same operators behind Five Oars Coffee Roasters Heritage next door, with the amber porthole linking the two rooms. Chua's brief reads, in his own framing, as a deliberate emotional construction: a small space conducive to an intimate, slightly escapist register, modelled on the feeling of urban alienation in Hopper's painting rather than on the painting's imagery. The result is what you might call a mood bar, in the sense that everything appears to have been built to alter my inner lighting. The room is small enough to make the city disappear. The design, by Jimin Fadjar of Studio Dinding, is dense enough that there is always something to look at. The lighting is low enough to flatter everyone and reveal almost nothing.

It is escapist, but not in the tropical, easy, holiday sense. It is escapist in the manner of a late-night diner after something has gone wrong, which is more interesting than ordinary prettiness. The compactness matters too. At eighty seats this would have become theme; at twenty-five, the feeling stays concentrated. Small bars have less room to lie. Every gesture is exposed. The bartender cannot disappear into distance. If the room is cold, I feel it immediately. If the drinks are weak, the room has nowhere to put them. If the service is false, the intimacy makes the falseness louder.

The day-to-day senior bartender is Samuel Pang: ex-banker, bars in Melbourne and Singapore, a recent World Class Singapore Top Three finisher. Chua himself is increasingly the elder statesman of the room rather than its everyday floor lead; his other venue, Junior the Pocket Bar, closed in May 2025, and he now also heads education at Bar Convent Singapore. The transition has been visible. The floor team has had to carry more of the room's warmth as Chua steps further into the mentor role.

The Nighthawks

The current menu is organised around an Emotion-Themed Collection: ten drinks each named after an emotion or response, priced at twenty-six (with a single one at twenty-eight). Loneliness / Independence is the conceptual heart, looping straight back to the Hopper brief. Alongside this sits a Classics list, a non-alcoholic section, and a small Tiny Pleasures category of paired shots. On paper, several of the builds are deranged: peanut butter scotch with PB&J sandwich service, miso-banana-chocolate over Macallan and Hennessy, bourbon poured over raspberry popping candy. That looseness is useful. The room is too controlled for the drinks to be timid. A bar like this cannot just serve tasteful variations on classics and expect the whole thing to hold.

I ordered the Nighthawks because the room had named a drink after itself and I wanted to know what it thought it was.

It arrived in a low coupe, dark and topped with a thick band of hot coconut foam. The build list reads rum, vodka, amaro, chocolate, coffee, MSG, and hot coconut foam. The first sip went through coffee, then chocolate, then the faintest savoury note from the MSG that I would not have identified if it had not been printed on the menu. The drink behaved like an Espresso Martini that had wandered into a Singapore hawker centre, found warmth, and come back changed. It was not subtle, but then the room is not subtle either, and the match held.

The combination should be awful: too sweet, too foamy, too clever, too much like a bartender trying to prove MSG belongs in everything. But as an idea it makes sense. Hopper's diner needs coffee. A Singapore bar needs heat, umami, coconut, a little dark sweetness, and the sense that the night is not over even if my better judgment is. That is what Night Hawk seems to understand about nightlife. After a certain hour I do not only want balance. I want recognition, a flavour that finds me quickly. The bartender's job is then to make the recognisable thing behave like a cocktail instead of a dessert table with spirits, which is harder than it sounds.

What surprised me, on the second sip, was the temperature physics. The coconut foam was genuinely hot, the drink underneath was cold, and the contrast carried the cocktail past where the gimmick should have collapsed. The thermal split kept the savoury MSG note articulate and stopped the chocolate from going gluey. That is a technical move dressed as a comfort drink, and the room's quiet intelligence is in disguising the work that way.

What the design has to do

The friction is obvious. Night Hawk may be too controlled, too clever, too small, too imageable. A room inspired by urban alienation can quickly become a room where everyone is taking photographs of alienation. That is the modern curse: we turn loneliness into content, then wonder why the room feels less lonely than branded.

That is not Night Hawk's fault exactly, but it is Night Hawk's problem. A cinematic bar has to resist becoming only cinematic. I should forget the design after the first twenty minutes, or rather, the design should become subconscious. The green marble should become surface, the mirrors should become depth, the amber globes should become warmth, the Hopper reference should dissolve. If I am still thinking this is very well designed after the second drink, something has failed.

The bar operates on walk-ins only, twenty-five seats and no reservations, which is both romantic and irritating. Romantic because it keeps the room slightly democratic, slightly uncertain, slightly open to accident. Irritating because twenty-five seats is twenty-five seats. Still, the format suits the concept. Reservations make a small bar behave too much like a schedule, and the possibility of not getting in gives the room some old nightlife tension. The danger is that scarcity makes guests sentimental: a small, hard-to-enter room can seem better than it is because I have already invested effort getting in, so the bar has to repay that effort quickly. A greeting matters. The first drink matters. The seat matters. In a twenty-five-seat room, nobody should feel like excess inventory.

What I keep returning to about Night Hawk is the tension between the design and the appetite. The bar looks like an art reference, but the drinks often read like cravings, and that tension saves it. If the drinks were as austere as the concept could have been, the room might become airless. If the room were as silly as some of the drink ingredients sound, it might become a gimmick. Instead, Night Hawk sits between them: elegant room, weird drinks, serious design, unserious appetites, loneliness as inspiration and hospitality as correction. That is a good place to be.

The food, ordered until nine-thirty only, leans honestly American diner: sliders, flatbread pizzas, hot wings, chicken and waffles, loaded fries. The register matches the room. Night Hawk feels more like a second-stop or last-stop room than a dinner solution. The appetite it understands best is not hunger; it is the stranger appetite that appears after the day has already ended but I have not.

The problem with designing a mood is that the mood can become fake. The bar's best defence is the cup in my hand: a drink that arrives and makes the room make sense, a bartender who makes the small space feel generous, a first sip that reminds me this is not a painting, not a set, not a design project. It is just a bar, which sounds basic, and which is the hardest thing for a room this designed to remain.