Easy on the Eye

You can’t get a negroni at Native. To be clear, Native is a cocktail bar. It is, in fact, one of the best cocktail bars in Singapore and has enjoyed vast popular and critical acclaim since it opened seven years ago. But still, you can’t get a negroni, because Native doesn’t carry Campari.

For a cocktail bar in New York or London, this omission would be unheard of—the negroni is one of the foundational drinks of what we think of as the Western cocktail canon—but Native is very much not a Western-style cocktail bar. It’s a Singapore bar, through and through: it was founded by a Singaporean and is firmly dedicated to locality—not just ingredients but locally crafted plates, cups and tables, and more than anything, a local ethos. The team tries to source everything possible from the island, and though it will expand the search to broader Asia if necessary, if something’s not made in Asia, it won’t be at the bar. Hence, none of the Italian liqueur.

When the modern cocktail movement first came to Singapore roughly 15 years ago, it arrived the same way it landed in Thailand and Mexico and Korea and Colombia and all the other countries where cocktails were not a traditional part of the culture: by doing imitations of European and American bars. Mixology is, after all, an American export—“the first uniquely American cultural product to catch the world’s imagination,” according to cocktail historian David Wondrich in his award-winning book Imbibe!—and it used to be that all bars were essentially US-style. Tippling Club and 28 HongKong Street in Singapore, Hyde & Seek and Vesper in Thailand, Le Chamber and Charles H. in South Korea, Hanky Panky in Mexico—these are exceptional establishments, to be sure, but it was fundamentally the same bottles on the back bar, the same lemon and lime juices in the drinks, and the same look and logic of the space. It’s only when you’re out on the sidewalk that you remember you’re not in New York.

But the centre of gravity has been quietly changing. Native was an early example of a new kind of bar now ascendent throughout the cocktail world, one that rethinks what a cocktail is or could be and makes the recipe fully its own. From Bogotá to Bangkok, the top-quality bars of this new generation are looking to their own cultures to find a refreshed sense of identity, one that speaks with a unique voice that could exist only in that specific place.

“I’m always trying to look for alternative sources of flavours and aromas,” says Pae Ketumarn, beverage manager of the year-old Funkytown, in Bangkok, Thailand, “and I had always wanted to use fish sauce in some capacity.” He’s describing a cocktail on the menu called the Som Tum, inspired by the Thai green-papaya salad of the same name. He infuses Suntory Roku gin from Japan with dried shrimp and chilli before mixing it with a zero-waste pomelo cordial, upcycled bottles of orange wine from Funkytown’s sister restaurant, tomato-confit water and, as a finishing touch, aerosolised fish sauce. “Salt doesn’t have to stop at being sea salt or saline solution, right?” he says. “There’s saltiness in everything.”

Funkytown is based on fermentation. The idea took hold during the Covid shutdown, when all the ingredients at the bar Ketumarn was managing would otherwise have gone to waste. He started fermenting first as a preservation device and then for flavour—fermented foods such as fish sauce and shrimp paste are inextricably woven throughout Thai cuisine, and while the bar adheres to international principles of cocktail balance, it does so in a way that’s distinctly Thai. Every cocktail at Funkytown incorporates fermentation, and each is given a funkiness rating from 1 to 5, as a tool for guests to help guide their experience. (The aforementioned seafood-laced Som Tum is a solid 5.)

At Native, bar manager Chong Yong Wei is also deep into fermentation, though sometimes toward different ends. One of those is to impart bite: sour-style cocktails need acid, and most of the Western world defaults to citrus thanks to its affordability, ample pungency and mild flavour. “There’s nothing wrong with lemons and limes,” he says, “but for us, we just like to explore.” Native finds acidity in fermenting its own kombucha and vinegar, or in the case of one cocktail on the current menu, a unique style of koji (the rice mould responsible for sake, soy sauce and miso); when introduced to rice, it not only blackens the grain but also produces citric acid. Chong dehydrates this sour black rice, grinds it into a powder and sprinkles it atop a drink called Kuro Koji, adding a dramatic jet-black top to the cocktail of purple sweet potato, Okinawan rice distillate, sweet sake, shikuwasa and koregusu. It’s a top-to-bottom reconceptualisation of not just the source of acidity but also how to apply it in a drink.

Zest, in the Gangnam district of Seoul, has undertaken the goal of creating an explicitly Korean cocktail bar. Fermentation is just one of many approaches that staff incorporate in their hyper-local, sustainability-based approach. Sustainability is something you’ll hear about from Western bartenders as well, but it’s almost invariably a box to check, one or two greenwashing details to talk about in interviews. That’s not always the case, of course, but generally speaking, minimising waste is not a core American/European value.

If your only experience with cocktail sustainability is paper straws that dissolve within minutes, you could be forgiven for believing that the eco-conscious movement comes at a direct cost to quality, but through treating zero waste as a foundational value, Zest—a self-described “sustainable fine-drinking” establishment—shows the two goals need not be mutually exclusive. (The name itself, in addition to being a flavourful part of a citrus rind, is a portmanteau of “zero waste”.) There, the principles of sustainability form a positive feedback loop, especially in the bar’s commitment to incorporating by-products of the various drink-making processes into other cocktails. For example, the team make one signature drink, a Jeju Garibaldi, in part by juicing a local type of orange from Jeju Island called a hallabong. They then dry that hallabong’s peels to redistill into their house gin and either ferment the pulp into a kind of kimchi or form it into a pickle for their Gibson cocktail: three unique ingredients for three different drinks, all from the same fruit.

Further proof can be found at the MO Bar, on the third floor of Singapore’s Mandarin Oriental. For a cocktail called the Elysium, bar manager Charlie Kim makes his own vermouth from the bread and rice unused by the hotel’s all-day buffet, combines it with leftover wine that he infuses with more unused rice, and stirs it with soju, aloe and Japanese vodka into a variation of a martini, somehow capturing flavours of candied grapes and brioche with a savory aquavit-like character. It’sabout as luxurious a bar as can be found anywhere in the world, and yet one that finds no tension between quality and sustainability.

When conceptualisingLa Sala de Laura, her bar in Bogotá, Colombia, Laura Hernández was looking for new narratives for Latin American mixology, to “move away from pre-conceived notions about what a cocktail bar should be”, she says. Her first decision would be to use local fruit or flowers, but realising they’d still be on the backbone of a foreign, mass-market base spirit, Hernández took the concept one step further and endeavoured to distill her own alcohol.

She now produces five spirits under the brand Territorio Ciclobioma, each made using native plants and ingredients to reflect one of Colombia’s unique and diverse landscapes. Piedemonte, for example, captures the foothills of the Andes by distilling coca leaves and cacao, while Desierto, made of prickly pear, expresses the warm earthiness of Colombia’s desert. A negroni at La Sala de Laura consists of Campari mixed with Hernández’s own Páramo (a fresh and herbal botanical distillate featuring indigenous wax laurel and páramo rosemary) and a house-made wild vermouth.

Hernández acknowledges the cocktail bar’s anglophone roots, based largely in technique and tradition, but sees a rise of something new across Latin America—and beyond. “There’s a strong emphasis on storytelling and cultural expression, where each cocktail is a way to share a piece of Colombia’s heritage,” she explains. She’s drawn to the sophistication of London’s Connaught Bar but also takes inspiration from Analogue in Singapore, Lady Bee in Lima, and Himkok in Oslo, for their trailblazing creativity and sustainability. “There’s a growing sense of pride and identity that resonates globally and challenges the idea of where the world’s best cocktails come from,” she says.

Now it’s the turn of American bars to look beyond their shores. The precision and technique at Martiny’s in New York borrow heavily from the Japanese tradition. Bartenders’ conversations about sustainability—which are proliferating from LA’s fine-dining spot Providence to Chicago cocktail destination the Whistler—originated overseas. The pioneering alcohol distributor ecoSpirits, which aims to eliminate packaging waste, started in Asia and has only recently expanded to

the US. At a minimum, these developments indicate that the traditional hubs of the cocktail world no longer dominate the conversation. “In the past, I used to look for inspiration in cities like London and New York, where the difference was very noticeable,” says Diego Cabrera, of Madrid’s celebrated bars Salmón Gurú and Viva Madrid. “Today, I look more to Latin America, Central America, and Asia.”

For sure, modern creativity can still be found in New York and London, too. Double Chicken Please, the No. 2 bar in the world according to the 50 Best organisation, is on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; its design-oriented approach and culinary-minded cocktail list (drinks there evoke foods such as Waldorf salad or Thai curry) might feel more like Asia than New York, but co-founder GN Chan would disagree. Chan moved from Taiwan to New York in 2011 because he heard it was the best place to make a name for yourself in the cocktail world, and he says if he had to do it again in 2024, he’d still “undoubtedly” pick New York. He insists New York’s diverse populace and cultural tapestry make it “the perfect place for a venture like this”. That said, Double Chicken Please seems to borrow more from the art world than the speakeasy down the street.

Which city is best for cocktails is a perennial debate, but what is certain is that the traditional epicentres of cocktail culture no longer hold the monopoly they once enjoyed. Oftentimes they’re the training ground where bartenders from around the world work before returning home to help seed the new generation. Carlos “Berry” Mora trained for years in London before returning to be head bartender of Arca, in Tulum, Mexico. He thinks of the Mexican cocktail scene now as wholly fuelled by a deep engagement with the local culture, as well as by the particular brand of Mexican hospitality and ingenuity. (His bar, for example, has neither power lines nor, for that matter, walls, and so temperature and dilution are a constant challenge.)

One of his cocktails is the Melipona—whiskey mixed with the naturally smoky honey from a local melipona bee, a local liqueur called Xtabentún, a local variety of sour orange, and ginger, all clarified into a milk punch and garnished with a honeycomb of melipona wax purchased from local craftspeople. It’s a hybrid of necessity (milk punch is a preservation technique in the hot weather), international influence (the drink is similar to a penicillin cocktail) and local Mexican ingredients and communities, all specific to that particular place.

The Mexican cocktail scene is on fire—the country is ascendent on the 50 Best organisation’s list of the world’s top (ironically enough) 100 bars, growing from two entries on the list in 2019 to eight in 2023—and Mora says he knows of five new high-profile bars opening in the next few months. He says Tulum is still up and coming, but compared with London, Mexico City is “almost as good”.

When asked what specifically Mexico City is missing that London possesses, Mora pauses. “Now that I think about it,” he says, “maybe nothing.”

 Top illustration by JOHN MATTOS