Cocktail Bars

On a fifteen-year-old room above Haji Lane that asks the most uncomfortable question in a bar: what do you actually want?

On a 1960s-themed Ritz-Carlton bar that could have worn the decade as costume and instead bought the actual era in a bottle: a Negroni built from sixty-year-old Campari and vermouth that tastes of time itself, buried under a regular menu that mostly trades in decor.

On a Bukit Pasoh bar that walks the thin line between cinematic restraint and well-dressed silence, and the four-ingredient menu refresh that argues the discipline still has pressure inside it.

A small experimental cocktail room hidden inside The Spiffy Dapper that begins with bad ideas and does the work required to find the one that was secretly good.

On a three-storey Amoy Street shophouse that argued, before most others, that the region was not garnish, and now has to figure out how to go deeper rather than louder.

On a twelve-seat basement below Club Street Laundry where the bar has stopped operating as something adjacent to the kitchen above and started operating as the kitchen's downstairs extension, and a cocktail served in a ceramic bowl that shows it.

On a twenty-five-seat Tanjong Pagar bar inspired by Edward Hopper, where the drinks have to survive the design's good taste, and the Nighthawks signature is the case for why they do.

On a tenth-anniversary cocktail bar above the Humpback shophouse that wins through pacing, balance, and the savoury cousin of the Martini.

On a voco Orchard speakeasy whose strongest argument is invisibility: Percolated Cocktails that strip ingredients rather than add them, behind a velvet curtain that does not quite need the secrecy.

On a 28-seat Ginza-format cocktail room at 2 Bukit Pasoh Road that does not negotiate with your mood, and whose ritual is the menu.

On a beloved cocktail bar that moved from Sago Street to Duxton Hill and carried over the harder thing. Not the layout, the feeling.

On a Conrad Singapore Orchard hotel bar that has spent the last two years going smaller and stranger instead of trying to win the attention back.