Tag
Notes and reviews from rooms that take the drink seriously.
On a Sago House Group tropical room that runs tiki, a fixed canon of frozen nostalgia, through a weekly-rotating, market-driven menu instead. The contradiction resolves at the one place tiki and freshness meet: the seasonality of tropical fruit.
On a Bauhaus-styled wine room and cocktail lounge inside a Duxton design hotel: the rare case where the design-hotel bar isn't coasting on the brand, with a cellar deep enough to back the aesthetic, split between a serious upstairs and a sceney downstairs that want different things from you.
On a Kampong Glam landmark where the no-menu bespoke cocktail is built from six gins the bar distilled itself, pushing the bespoke idea one step further back, to the base spirit.
On the highest rooftop bar in the city, two hundred and eighty-two metres up, reached by two lifts and presided over by a light sculpture, where the view is so spectacular it stops excusing the ordinary food, drinks and service and starts magnifying them.
On a Jigger & Pony group bar that trades the group's signature restraint for 1980s city-pop maximalism (four zones, neon, a Suntory tie-in) and a savoury shiso sour that proves the drink discipline survives even when the concept goes loud.
On a New Bahru bar built around fermentation, cinema speakers, and a peanut butter wine that sounds like a joke until you taste it.
On a glamorous, loud, late North Canal Road cantina from the Barbary Coast team that treats agave the way Mexico does, as a party spirit rather than a studied one, and proves with a mezcal margarita that a party bar can keep a serious cocktail standard.
On a Prinsep Street speakeasy whose hidden entrance, the most exhausted conceit in the city, is the rare one worth keeping, because the facade is a recreated vanishing Singaporean provision shop rather than a generic secret door.
On the loose, music-led sibling of a formal Duxton omakase bar, where the records are the least distinctive thing in the room and the real argument is a base spirit nobody else builds cocktails on, working beautifully on a Lemon Sour and straining on a Negroni.
On a Jigger & Pony group room on Tras Street that takes makgeolli, soju, and Korean drinking culture seriously enough to build a cocktail house around them.
On a hidden Orchard hotel bar that should be tired by now, and the cask programme that has survived the bartender who built it.
On a Purvis Street bar that has spent over a decade testing whether Singaporean-ness can be the structure of a drink, not just the garnish.