Singapore

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 Dempsey campus where the lab's most-discussed claims show up in two early bites of bread, and on a kitchen that has, two years in, stopped performing the project the press is still performing for it.

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 specialty café staged like a park inside an industrial warehouse, the kind of maximalist photo set that makes people assume style over substance, with a genuine micro-roastery humming behind the greenery that most of the crowd never quite believes is real.

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 CBD tasting room that houses Indian-Sri Lankan home cooking inside the omakase format, two opposed instincts (chef-precision and a mother's feel) that meet when the four-renditions structure illuminates the heritage recipe and clash when the precision formalises the warmth out.

On a viral Chinese bakery chain that landed its first overseas outlet in a Singapore supermarket basement, built on a single twenty-year-old product. The namesake cake genuinely impresses. The rest of the menu is just along for the queue.

On the Bukit Pasoh shophouse where Björn Frantzén imported his Stockholm restaurant at Stockholm scale, and a French toast from 2008 has stayed on the menu the whole way through.

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 an Orchard steakhouse that has been firing the same applewood grill since 2008, in a city now crowded with newer, buzzier steak rooms, and the question of whether a smoke-sweet char on dry-aged beef still earns a top-tier bill, or whether the dinner price is partly a reputation tax.

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.