The Shochu, Not the Vinyl, at RPM

The records at RPM are the least interesting thing about it.

That is not a criticism of the records. The floor-to-ceiling vinyl shelves, the turntable, the big JBL speakers, the dark wood and leather: the listening-bar template is executed properly here, and the sound is good. The problem is that the template is no longer distinctive. By 2026 every other bar in the city has a vinyl wall and a turntable, and the listening-bar conceit has gone from a point of difference to a default. A drinker who comes to RPM for the records will find a good version of a thing that is now everywhere.

The reason to come sits on the back bar, where a cocktail room would normally stock gin, whisky, and rum. Here it is shochu, lots of it. RPM builds its cocktails on shochu as the base spirit, which almost no one does, and that base move is the reason to come.

RPM is the loose, music-led sibling of D.Bespoke, the formal omakase cocktail bar a few doors into the same world, both under Daiki Kanetaka. Where the omakase bar runs on ceremony, RPM is the long sit with an album. The day-to-day is run by Iwamitsu Shinji, from Kyushu's Miyazaki, a shochu region, which is the relevant biographical fact. The room holds around thirty seats, built for staying rather than passing through. The drinks are the reason the staying is worth it, and the drinks run on shochu.

The Lemon Sour, where shochu belongs

The shochu Lemon Sour was the drink where the base move is most natural.

Shochu lemon sour is a Japanese staple, just shochu, lemon, and soda, and RPM's version is the bar's argument at its most comfortable. The first sip was the test. The shochu was present rather than neutral. Its clean, slightly earthy character read through the fresh lemon and the soft carbonation, giving the drink a body and a faint earthiness that a vodka or gin sour would not have. The intensity was lower than a Western-spirit sour, because shochu sits below those spirits in proof and aggression, and that lower intensity was the point. The drink was refreshing, low-aggression, and built for the long sit. You can drink three of them across an album side without the drink wearing you down.

That is the shochu base working as a genuine argument rather than as a novelty. The instinct, hearing "shochu Lemon Sour," is to expect a Japanese-bar flourish on an otherwise standard drink, the base swapped out for a theme. The Lemon Sour was the opposite. The shochu was the right base for this drink: lower in intensity, present in character, built for the slow register the listening bar runs on. The base move had a real logic, and the Lemon Sour is where the logic is cleanest.

The Negroni, where it strains

The shochu Negroni was the interesting stretch, the drink where the base move met a classic it could not quite carry.

The Negroni is the most structure-dependent classic. It needs a base strong enough to stand up to Campari's bitterness and the vermouth's weight, and gin's juniper-and-proof is built for that fight. Shochu, lower-proof and more delicate, struggled. The Campari led the drink, the shochu receded under it, and the cocktail read as a slightly thin Negroni rather than as a shochu reinvention of one. The base that suits the Lemon Sour, light and clean and low-intensity, was exactly the wrong base for a drink that needs a spirit with the spine to push back against Campari.

That is less a failure than the limit of the bar's central move. A base spirit chosen for its lightness will serve the drinks that want lightness and strain on the drinks that want strength. The Lemon Sour wants lightness, and the shochu delivers. The Negroni wants strength, and the shochu cannot supply it. The barrel-aged Taimatsu sat in between, the barrel-ageing adding the body and depth the bare shochu lacks, which is the bar's way of giving the base the spine it needs for a more structured drink. The Taimatsu worked better than the Negroni precisely because the barrel did the work the shochu alone could not.

A drinker reading the menu through the shochu lens, working out which classics want lightness and which want strength, will order well. The sours, the highballs, the spritzes are where shochu belongs. The spirit-forward, bitter-heavy classics are where it strains, unless the bar has barrel-aged the base into something stronger.

The room and the relationship

The service is the loose counterpoint to the omakase bar's ceremony, warm and music-led, knowledgeable about the shochu without performing the knowledge. Asked about the Lemon Sour, the bartender named the specific shochu base and explained why it suited the drink, then moved on. The shochu focus is real expertise carried lightly, which is the right register for a long-sit listening room.

The relationship to the formal sibling is worth understanding before you arrive, because it can confuse expectations. RPM is not a cheaper version of the omakase bar. It is the loose, different-register sibling, the music-led room where you build a night around an album and a few low-intensity shochu drinks rather than the ceremony of a formal cocktail omakase. A drinker expecting the omakase bar's formality at RPM's prices will be reading the room wrong. The two rooms share an owner and a city block and very little else in register. RPM is the accessible entry to the shochu world, and the omakase bar is the deep end. They are siblings, not a tier system.

The friction

The friction with RPM is the friction the vinyl creates and the shochu resolves.

The listening-bar format is no longer distinctive, and a drinker who came for the records will find a familiar conceit executed well. The risk for the bar is that it gets known for the common thing, the vinyl, rather than for the rare one, the shochu. The records bring people in. The shochu is what should keep them.

The other friction is the unevenness of the base move. The shochu works on some classics and strains on others, and a drinker who orders the spirit-forward bitter drinks expecting a shochu reinvention will get a thinner version of the classic instead. The bar rewards the drinker who orders to the base's strengths, the sours, the highballs, the barrel-aged builds, and underwhelms the drinker who orders against them.

The third is the long-sit commitment. The room is built for staying with the music, and a drinker who wants a quick drink and a quick exit is in the wrong room. The shochu's low intensity is designed for the long sit, so a drinker not settling in for one is paying for a register they are not using.

What the bar is for

RPM is one of the rare listening bars in Singapore where the music is the least distinctive thing and the base spirit is the actual argument. The shochu Lemon Sour is the base move at its most natural. The shochu Negroni is where it strains. The barrel-aged Taimatsu is the bar's way of giving the base the spine the structured classics need. The vinyl is the room, and the shochu is the reason to come.

The Lemon Sour, low-intensity and built for the long sit with the shochu present rather than neutral, was the drink that proved the base move is a genuine argument. A shochu obsessive who runs a formal omakase bar and opened a loose, music-led room to build classic cocktails on the base spirit nobody else uses has made the more interesting kind of listening bar, one where the records are the backdrop and the shochu is the point.

The records are the backdrop, and the shochu is what you came for, even if you didn't know it yet. A drinker who comes for the first and leaves without understanding the second has been to the wrong bar in the right building.