Hong Kong Street
28 HongKong Street
No sign on the door, and tight, classic programming behind it. The room has been quietly excellent since 2011. We have been loudly mediocre for about as long.
A guide to Singapore’s cocktail scene
Bars Better Than Us
A working list of Singapore’s best cocktail bars, written by The Spiffy Dapper. Thirty rooms, alphabetical, current.
Singapore has too many good cocktail bars and we are not the best of them. Here is where to go when you want a better drink than we are likely to make tonight.
Parkview Square · Bugis
Atlas
The most beautiful room in Singapore, with an eight-metre Gin Tower holding over 1,300 bottles. It is what people picture when they imagine a Singapore cocktail bar. We are what they actually find.
Orchard · voco Orchard
The Backdrop
Hidden behind an unmarked wall inside the voco Orchard hotel, with a password we could never be trusted to keep. A 37-seat speakeasy where Dario Knox builds his ‘Percolated Cocktails’ over open flame at sub-zero temperatures, in front of you. Nothing in Singapore works quite like it.
River Valley · New Bahru
Bar Bon Funk
Our River Valley neighbour, in a far better-designed room than ours. A listening bar built around vintage McIntosh amps and custom Altec A5 speakers, with cocktails chosen to match the records. The sound system got the attention ours never did.
Haji Lane
Bar Stories
The OG. Dave Koh has run it since 2010, and it was the first room in Singapore to do no-menu bespoke cocktails. You tell them what you like and they make it, and you remember the result whether or not it lands.
Tanjong Pagar · Tras Street
BOP (Bartenders of Pony)
Jigger & Pony’s Korean spin-off: soju bombs, dalgona cocktails, and K-drinking culture handled with real precision. Uno Jang runs it, and won bartender of the year before he arrived. The most fun room in town right now, which we mention with some envy.
Duxton Road
Cat Bite Club
Singapore’s largest agave collection, more than 200 bottles crammed into one small, opinionated room. Jesse Vida (ex-Atlas) and Gabriel Lowe (ex-Paradise Lost) founded it. Mezcal you have never heard of, and nobody showing off about any of it.
Bukit Pasoh Road
D.Bespoke
Ginza-style, with everything customised and every motion deliberate. Daiki Kanetaka owns and runs it after sixteen years in the Japanese bar system, with Hidetsugu Ueno as a mentor. The most precise bar in Singapore, and the opposite of us in most respects.
Tanjong Pagar Road
The Elephant Room
Little India in cocktail form, built on spices and ferments and ingredients carried over from Tekka Market. Yugnes ‘Yugi’ Susela founded it after a stint at Smoke & Mirrors. One cultural idea runs through the whole list, with a discipline we have never sustained for a week.
Amoy Street
Employees Only
The Singapore outpost of the New York bar, open here since 2016, hidden behind a working fortune teller’s booth on Amoy Street. Liz Teo runs it locally for the founding partners. The food keeps pace with the cocktails, and the back room has been known to dance.
Amoy Street
FURA
Future-facing and sustainability-obsessed, with no compromise on flavour. Sasha Wijidessa (ex-Operation Dagger) and Christina Rasmussen (ex-forager at Noma) co-founded it. It won Asia’s 50 Best Sustainable Bar Award and made us quietly stop counting our bottle bins.
Bukit Pasoh Road
Gibson
Classy the way a good suit is classy, without showing off about it. Part of the Jigger & Pony Group, and the Gibson on the menu is made the way it ought to be. Which is, of course, the way we keep meaning to make ours.
Club Street
Hup San Social Club
Possibly the smallest cocktail bar in Singapore: twelve seats in a Club Street basement, hidden behind Club Street Laundry. June Baek (ex-MO Bar, ex-Bar Cham in Seoul) runs the list, a playful, emotion-led thing called ‘Do What Brings You Joy’. We have more seats and less joy.
Tanjong Pagar · Amara Hotel
Jigger & Pony
The most decorated bar in Singapore, top three in Asia and top ten in the world year after year. They hand you a glass and tell you exactly what is in it. We manage that on a Tuesday and forget by Friday.
Purvis Street
Last Word
A minimalist Japanese room from the Nutmeg & Clove team, leaning on tea-based and floral cocktails. Quiet, precise, and very easy to lose an evening in. Named, naturally, after the cocktail.
Bukit Pasoh Road
Live Twice
Japanese mid-century modern, all mizuwaris and restraint. Part of the Jigger & Pony Group, with a tight fourteen-drink list. It respects the spirit it pours and trusts the drinker to do the same, both of which we attempt with mixed results.
Ann Siang Hill
Mad & Midas
A basement under No. 14 Ann Siang Road, beneath Brooklyn Bar. Naz Arjuna’s room, unapologetically 1990s, with childhood-reference cocktails and twenty-dollar classics. The pizza is apparently the surprise. We do not serve pizza, on the grounds that we would ruin it.
Regent Singapore · Cuscaden Road
Manhattan
The grown-ups’ bar: velvet armchairs, herringbone floors, and an in-hotel rickhouse where they age their own spirits. It executes a level of pretension we only aspire to. We have not, to date, got close.
Amoy Street
Native
Vijay Mudaliar’s bar. He forages, and they distil their own ingredients upstairs. They once served us a cocktail with an ant in it and we finished it. Top ten in Asia, because they take this seriously.
Chinatown
Night Hawk
Twenty-five seats, owned and run by Peter Chua, named after the Edward Hopper painting. The cocktails go everywhere else: miso, peanut butter, green chilli, whatever Peter wants to make fly. It holds its own on a quiet Wednesday, which is more than we can say for ourselves.
Purvis Street
Nutmeg & Clove
Cocktails drawn from Singapore the place, not the postcard: spiced and properly local. Colin Chia founded it in 2014. They run so many guest shifts now that we could not tell you what is on the menu tonight, which is probably for the best.
North Canal Road
Offtrack
A music-led listening bar with Pan-Asian food, a tight cocktail list and rotating art on the walls. Top twenty-five in Asia and climbing. They listen. We talk.
River Valley · Inside The Spiffy Dapper
Oriental Elixir
A secret bar inside The Spiffy Dapper, built first as an R&D space with Tanglin Gin. Every drink is bespoke and made once, with shelves of things slowly soaking in gin. Half of them taste like they should not work. The other half are how we learned.
Shangri-La · Orange Grove Road
Origin Bar
A new concept menu every year, around eighteen drinks, future-facing to the point of provocation. Go if you want to be surprised by a cocktail, or if you want to see what the rest of us will be doing in two years.
Marriott Tang Plaza · Orchard
The Other Room
A hotel speakeasy with no signage and a buzzer to press, leaning on cask-finished spirits and twisted classics. Solid work behind a velvet curtain. Ours is behind a less photogenic door, and there is a difference.
The Ritz-Carlton · Marina Bay
Republic
Inside the Ritz-Carlton, a portal to the 1960s, with a menu sorted into Art, Cinema, Fashion and Music. It got very good very fast. The kind of polish we admire from a safe distance.
Duxton Hill
Sago House
Now on Duxton, run by Des. It started as a pandemic side project and turned into one of the most consistent bars in Asia. It is also George’s only successful bar, on the strength of George not running it.
Telok Ayer Street
Shin Gi Tai
No menu. You say what you want and they make it. Anthony Zhong founded it after Coffee Bar K in Ginza and a founding role at Jigger & Pony. The name is a martial-arts idea about uniting mind, skill and body, which tells you how seriously they take it.
Neil Road
Side Door
Bannie Kang’s bar; she won Diageo World Class in 2019 and Asia’s Best Bartender in 2021, and her husband Tryson Quek runs the kitchen. It began as private dining at home and is now a proper room on Neil Road. The marriage surviving the workload is the most impressive thing here.
Amoy Street
Stay Gold Flamingo
A café called Flamingo by day, a rock-and-roll bar called Stay Gold by night. Jerrold Khoo (ex-Jigger & Pony) and Bai JiaWei (ex-Employees Only) founded it. The five o’clock changeover is a small religious experience.
This list is not exhaustive. It is, however, opinionated. If we missed somewhere obvious, the bartender on the night is happy to argue with you about it.