Order the Negroni at Origin

Origin Bar has a word problem. The word is journey.

Hotel bars love journeys. Beverage programmes love journeys. Cocktail menus especially love journeys. The guest is always being taken somewhere: across time, across districts, across memory, across the bartender's imagination, across a map nobody asked for. Very often, journey is what a bar says when it has a nice room, a complicated menu, and no sharper way to explain why the drink costs what it costs.

Origin Bar lives dangerously close to that problem. It sits inside Shangri-La Singapore, on the lobby level of the Tower Wing at 22 Orange Grove Road, which already puts it at risk. Hotel bars tend toward soft theatre. They are designed for people passing through rather than people returning, and they are fond of words like voyage, origin, destination. They are usually very good at welcome and occasionally less good at life. Origin Bar is called Origin Bar. The danger is immediate.

I sat at the bar end rather than the lounge tables and ordered a Negroni. Partly because it is my reflex first drink, and partly because a concept-heavy hotel bar's response to a boring classic order tells me more about the room than any signature ever could.

The journey problem

The room does not hide the premise. It resembles an old-school train station: vaulted arches, deep blues and greens, dark wood, gold, a long bar, plush lounge seating, the polished sense that I am meant to be departing somewhere even while sitting absolutely still. The design references Grand Central in New York and Tanjong Pagar Railway Station. The back bar is shaped like a train ticketing box, draped with silk curtains. It holds more than six hundred spirits, around a hundred and fifty of them rums sourced globally, which reads as a meaningful curation rather than decorative abundance.

This is a lot of concept before the first drink. That does not make it bad. It just makes the drink's job harder. A travel-themed hotel bar has to fight cliché every minute: the old suitcase, the platform, the map, the ticket, the sense that colonial glamour has been polished until all the inconvenient parts have disappeared. The bar's earlier menus leaned directly into Singapore's districts, turning the city into a board game for visitors with expense accounts. The 2024 Infinity: Bartenders' Far-fetched Ideas menu pivoted to sustainability and technical mischief. The current menu, Point of View, launched in April 2025 under Head Bartender Pranisa "Niza" Treechanasin with Director of Beverage Adam Bursik, who came from Nutmeg & Clove and The Library before joining Shangri-La.

That is three full menu rebuilds in three years. The cadence matters more than the journey language. A hotel bar that rebuilds its concept yearly is doing more editorial work than most independent rooms manage in five.

The current menu is also the most useful version of Origin's premise. Eighteen cocktails and five mocktails sit in three chapters: Reimagined (classics rebuilt), New Era (drinks addressing contemporary problems), Boundless (unconventional inventions). The framing is the way we see it rather than this is Singapore, which is a much better position. It gives the bar permission to be wrong in interesting ways. A drink programme with a point of view should not pretend to be definitive. It should simply show its angle clearly enough that I can decide whether the angle works.

The Negroni and the Saz-Air-Ak

There is a moment in any concept-heavy bar where you can feel the room decide how to receive a boring order. Some bars treat it as a small disappointment, briskly handled. Origin did not. The bartender nodded, asked which gin I preferred, asked whether I wanted it on the rock or up, and made a Negroni that tasted as if the bar had not stopped caring about classics while it was busy chasing concepts. Cold, bitter, round. The orange peel cut narrow enough that the oil pulled out as a smell rather than a slick. It was the kind of drink that makes the rest of the menu look more confident, not less, because the bar can clearly hold both ends of the work.

That was the test, and the bar passed it. A serious cocktail bar does not refuse to make a simple drink properly. The discipline is to make the simple thing as well as the complicated thing, and to do it without sulking.

I followed it with the Saz-Air-Ak, the Reimagined chapter's headline rebuild: Michter's Rye with peach, lemon oils, an absinthe-infused foam called Absinthe Air, and bitters. The drink arrived in a small rocks glass with a pale cloud of absinthe foam sitting on the surface. The first sip pulled the absinthe through the nose before the rye landed, which is the menu's structural argument compressed into one glass: take the ingredient that usually disappears into the build (in a Sazerac, the absinthe rinse) and make it the lead. The rye held its spine underneath. The peach added a small stone-fruit sweetness the classical version does not have. The lemon oils kept the drink lifted rather than syrupy. It was a Sazerac that had been opened sideways, recognisable but rearranged.

What surprised me, finishing the glass, was the small piece of editorial honesty in the build. Many concept cocktails dress up a small move with theatrical service (the dome, the smoke, the tableside pour) to compensate for a thin idea. The Saz-Air-Ak does the opposite. The technique, the foam, is the idea, and the rest of the build is calibrated to let it carry. The foam is not a garnish. It is structurally what the drink is built around, which is the right way to use a single technical move.

The other drinks across the menu run the same logic at the same standard. No Offense runs popcorn-infused Orientalist Imperial rum through a house pimento dram. Jumper clarifies cocoa-butter-washed Volcán tequila with pistachio, matcha, cream, and fernet. Ants & Bees runs Iichiko Saiten shochu through burnt honey, vanilla, and verjus, served with a piece of high-cocoa chocolate topped with lemon ants. Compost-Politan, the menu's clearest sustainability statement, is a Cosmopolitan built from leftover citrus, dry orange, hibiscus, and discarded grape-skin vodka. It tastes like a Cosmopolitan first and like a sustainability project second, which is the correct calibration. Zero to Hero clarifies a hazelnut-maple-toasted-milk-and-apple Monkey Shoulder punch.

The drinks where the technique stays visible, the nacho-powder rim on Galaxy Nacho, the lemon ants on Ants & Bees, are the ones where the menu's editorial confidence has not fully landed yet. The bolder concept asks the diner to admire the gesture before tasting the drink. The better Origin cocktails ask the diner to taste the drink first and admire the gesture second.

What the menu actually is

The most interesting structural decision Origin has made in the Point of View era is to sell the menu as a take-home book for thirty dollars. Most hotel-bar menus are designed to be consumed and discarded. Origin's POV menu is designed to leave the bar with the guest. The cover is printed in the same edition as the bar's. The text is the same. The cocktail credits are the same. The book also carries Bursik's printed House Rules, funny on the page and operational on the floor: A person who is nice to you but rude to our staff is not a nice person. That second sentence is the most concrete editorial statement any hotel bar in Singapore has printed in its menu, and the room's hospitality posture flows from it.

That is the structural decision most worth taking from the room. A bar that thinks of its menu as an object rather than as a document is making an argument about how seriously it takes its own editorial work. The food programme runs the same discipline. Chef Simon Bell at Origin Grill has built the bar's small-bites menu around a single rule: hands or chopsticks only, no cutlery. Thirteen dishes: Crack & Prawn, Super Jerky, Onion Rings, Beef Hash, Charcoal Ribs, Baked Camembert, Cheeseburger, Chicken Bao, Fried Gelato, poké kinilaw, kofta tacos, ramen. The constraint does the work the cocktail menu's chapter structure does. It forces the kitchen to commit to dishes that pair with drinks rather than performing alongside them. Most hotel cocktail bars get the drinks right and the food wrong. Origin has, since Bell's small-bites pivot, gotten both right.

The friction is real. Origin can be too smooth, too hotel, too concept-led, too fond of the word journey, too polite about Singapore, too eager to turn perspective into presentation. The rum collection gives the bar a more grounded identity than the journey language alone. Rum is a good spirit for Origin because it carries trade, empire, sugar, heat, violence, pleasure, sea routes, plantations, tropical fantasy, and modern cocktail ease. It carries the romance of travel and the darker history underneath it, and the bar should lean into those shadows more. Not by becoming moralistic, but by remembering that old-world travel fantasy comes with baggage larger than a vintage suitcase. That knowledge can make the drinks better. It can push the bar away from postcard flavours and toward more complicated pleasures. Compost-Politan's leftover citrus and discarded grape-skin vodka are not purely glamorous ideas, and that is why they help. They roughen the journey.

Origin's best version is not the bar that takes me on a journey. It is the bar that knows the journey language is only scaffolding. The actual thing is simpler: a good room, a drink with a point of view, enough technical mischief to keep the glass alive, food that does not pretend to be more than it is, and service warm enough to stop the whole production becoming a presentation. The Negroni at the bar, on a Wednesday evening with the POV book sitting open on the counter and the House Rules printed on the inside cover, was the evidence that the bar can still make the boring drink properly when the boring drink is what I want.