For a place that’s known to be quite conservative, Singapore offers cocktails that have a tendency to make your heart race. In just one recent week of drinking across town, I sipped a rum-yogurt cocktail that included two kinds of Southeast Asian ants; ordered off a “menu” that was a bag of gummy bears custom-flavored to mimic each drink; and tasted a flight of “natural wines” fermented from fig and pear, tomato, and cabbage. And that’s not to mention the tall drink with “performance-enhancing drugs,” which turned out to be a rose aperitif with pink dragon fruit, basil seeds, and a Malaysian virility bark called tongkat ali. 

To call this bar world creative would be a wild understatement. Shaking off its reputation as a staid, workaholic city-state, Singapore has exploded onto the cocktail scene as one of the world’s premiere bar cities. In October it took six spots in this year’s “World’s 50 Best Bars” list, third only to perennial cocktail capitals London (with eight ) and New York (seven). 

Ranked the highest in Singapore is the opulent hotel bar Manhattan (No. 7 on the list), with what must be the world’s most ambitious barrel-aging system; then there’s Atlas (No.  15), a soaring, art deco-inspired space with exquisite martinis and a 1,000-bottle gin tower. They represent only a sliver of the remarkably diverse cocktail culture that’s sprung up within a three-mile radius in the unlikeliest of places. (Scroll down for our full list of favorites.)

Cocktails from Scratch
Just five or six years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to say Singapore had a cocktail culture at all. Sure, there was the Singapore Sling, invented at the famously peanut-strewn Long Bar at the Raffles—but that was it. Modern mixology? That required a trip abroad.

Husband-and-wife team Indra Kantono and Gan Guoyi remember being met with raised eyebrows when they opened one of the city’s original craft cocktail bars, Jigger & Pony, in 2012. “Is this really safe at night?” Guoyi remembers her parents asking, referring not only to the bar business but also her choice of neighborhood. Amoy Street, on the outskirts of Chinatown, is now home to four of the most highly regarded bars in the city—Jigger & Pony included.

Kantono says Singapore’s rise as a cocktail capital is a direct result of nothing being there before. He describes the city as an empty canvas. “We don't have a century-old love affair with wines, or with whiskies, or anything at all,” says Kantono, who, with Guoyi, now runs five establishments, with another on the way. “In New York there are expectations for what a cocktail bar is. Here it’s kind of a blank slate.”

Steven Mason, general manager at the double-Michelin-starred Odette, echoed the same notion. “Nothing is produced here, which means you have no ties with anyone,” he said. “That can be a wonderful thing.”

Thinking Outside the Box
Singapore is a truly international city, with a constant influx of foreigners as well as locals who tend to work or study abroad. Having picked up a taste for craft cocktails abroad, they now seek them back at home. “People really like new experiences in Singapore,” Kantono says. “They expect something they haven’t tried before.”

Of course, wealth is the underpinning to all this. A world capital of finance and trade, Singapore is home to residents and expats with money to spend and more and more tourists ready to do the same.

Enter Employees Only, one of New York’s most highly regarded cocktail bars, which opened a Singapore branch in 2016. Co-founder Igor Hadzismajlovic says the city’s “diverse expat community of people who love to eat and drink” is what sold him on the destination. “We were confident we would have an audience there,” he explains. 

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