New cocktail menus in Singapore: 7 bars to sip, savour and celebrate

CNA

3 hours ago

There's been a pall over Singapore's F&B scene lately, with closure announcements landing in headlines as often as bartenders hear 'Surprise me'. Yet the spirit of hospitality refuses to be shaken. Newcomers like Casper and The Cocktail Office have, ahem, stepped up to the bar, and five homegrown favourites earned spots on Asia ' s 50 Best Bars list. Now, seven more dimly lit havens have unveiled fresh menus to prove the local cocktail scene still has plenty of stories left to pour.
SPECTRE
When Spectre first opened in 2023 and billed itself as a mental wellness-themed bar, it was a concept practically begging to open a Pandora's box of therapy-on-tap jokes. But make fun all you want — the bar has been putting its money where its mouth is, partnering with therapists to provide free counselling for F&B professionals in Singapore, as well as offering menus and events that encourage conversations around the pricklier themes of our lives.
Its first menu refresh since opening continues this discourse with tipples inspired by the six stages of healing (awareness, acceptance, feeling, forgiveness, affirmation, and transformation, in case you were wondering). All of them come with prompts that (hopefully) lead to some reflection. Precipice of Old asks you to look back on key moments that changed the trajectory of your life, and the spirit-forward cocktail echoes this by changing when you pause to let it warm up a little. The savoury Dialogue, made with the bar's own black garlic brine, asks what you say to yourself when you're in need of support. Refreshingly briny Narrative flips the question by asking what stories tend to run uncensored through your mind.
Of course, you can go in with the sole intention of enjoying a good drink. The bar's former hits like the snake soup-laced Bonseki are still on the menu, and there's a refreshed list of classics that lean toward forgotten gems like the Blood & Sand, Old Pal, and Gold Rush.
ANTI:DOTE
With a new team that includes head bartender Eduardo Zamora — winner of the World Gourmet Awards Mixologist of the Year in 2022 — and bar manager Carla Davina, formerly from The Dandy Collection, Anti:dote, Fairmont Singapore ' s swanky watering hole, has crafted a range of liquid prescriptions to lift you out of the funk of living.
Drinks have names like Main Character Energy, Fatigue Fix, and Guilty Not Guilty, giving you an idea of how much fun the team clearly had creating them. But the mixology is serious, with plenty of sensory curveballs. Shimmer & Shine has a savoury nose from Planteray dark rum and umeshu, but port and homemade pear liqueur give you a heady hit of sweetness. Pretty Please smells like a spa and tastes like restoration, thanks to a blend of cognac, ylang ylang, sakura, peach and lychee.
They're also as fun to look at as they are to drink. The bar team has gone all-out on presentation: Pretty Please arrives in a swirl of dry ice mist and flowers, while Curious Chameleon is poured from a glass teapot into a champagne flute, the drink growing pinker the longer it macerates with the raspberry hibiscus sorbet in the pot.
ATLAS
Loosely translated as the 'Journal of Good Taste', the Gazette du Bon Ton was a short-lived but influential French fashion magazine published between 1912 and 1925. And it is with this same emphasis on glamour, style and good taste, that Atlas unveils its 2025 menu.
As the bar known for having the largest gin collection in the world, you would be remiss to walk out without some sort of martini. Its finesse with the spirit shines in A Dash of Daring, which sounds like a hybrid between a vesper and a dirty martini — two types of gin, vodka, citrus liqueur and olives — but the result is remarkably cohesive, being neither too strong nor too briny, and brightened with a wash of citrus.
Tea cocktails are still having a moment, and there are two here worth trying: The Zaz Zuh Zaz (say that three times fast), which combines calvados, cognac, pineapple, smoked green tea, and peach for a silky, smoke-kissed tropicality; and the Streamliner, which on its own would just be reminiscent of a clarified milk punch with a tea twist, but gains new dimension from its white chocolate garnish, rounding it into an elegant dessert cocktail.
But what you really want to do is end the night with Ashcombe House (rhubarb-infused champagne, scotch, gin, sherry, raspberry dark chocolate) — the kind of drink that seems to have been dreamed up in the shadowed drawing rooms of majestic English manors.
MANHATTAN
You've got to hand it to Manhattan for consistently committing to a theme with Broadway-level dedication. Its latest menu takes guests on a four-season journey through the eyes of New Yorkers, presented as a desk calendar complete with pop-art illustrations and even a built-in light — a thoughtful touch given that the bar remains one of the city's most scarcely illuminated.
The storytelling carries through to the drinks. Where the Boys Are channels the sunburnt euphoria of spring break, swirling tequila and mezcal with sunny fruit flavours. Its garnish, made with a dehydrated plum and a melon sphere, looks uncannily like a ping-pong ball mid-splash, a cheeky nod to the game of beer pong.
A warm cocktail might sound counterintuitive in our recent heatwave, but It's Getting' Hot in Here will upend your assumptions. Butter and herb aromas give way to a gently spiced honey and aged genever palate, so it's more snug than sweltering.
And if you've heroically sipped your way through all four seasons, the journey doesn't end. The Friends of Manhattan series invites visiting bartenders and brands to leave their signature in the bar's rickhouse, where barrel-aged creations from the likes of Melbourne's Mille Tang and London's Connaught Bar lie patiently in wait.
CYGNET
Another bar seduced by the city that never sleeps, Cygnet turns its gaze to New York's literary legends. Breakfast At Tiffany's reimagines the classic Aviation with Earl Grey tea and lavender in place of creme de violette, crafting a light, floral tipple fit for brunch. Here Is New York pays tribute to EB White and Roger Angell's love letter to the city with a spiced apple pie you can drink. But the most faithful nod has to be The Godfather: Bourbon cask wood chips lend a smoky whisper, sherry brings a hint of salinity, and chocolate bitters pull it all together for an impactful finish.
But Cygnet is just as eager to champion local flavour. The other half of the menu spotlights Southeast Asian ingredients in reinvented classics: Penicillins get a spicy warmth from galangal instead of ginger, Vespers feature Singapore's Brass Lion gin, and Old Fashioneds bloom with layers of gula melaka, cinnamon, pandan, and saffron.
MO BAR
Meanwhile, MO Bar is proudly flying the crescent moon and stars with its sixth menu, The Echoes of Singapore. Fun fact: All 15 cocktails were dreamed up by an international team, which somehow makes this homage to the little red dot even more heartfelt.
Nostalgia is the name of the game here, starting with an actual View-Master that lets you peek at pictures of the drinks — a clever distraction for anyone stuck waiting. The menu itself serves up bite-sized stories of Singapore's past: Banana Dollar, a fresh and frothy baijiu cocktail, nods to the currency issued during the Japanese occupation. Rum-based Haji Lane and kaya-infused Sarapan offer tourist-friendly introductions to modern Singaporean flavours.
There's also a future-facing chapter on the menu, where the highly Instagrammable Plant-ish shines as a dessert cocktail inspired by Singapore's 30 by 30 vision to produce 30 per cent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030. And they've — mercifully — reworked the Singapore Sling into Sling 2.0: A cocktail that tastes less like a sugary fever dream and more like a properly integrated martini, but with a lollipop garnish crafted from the original's key ingredients. So the longer you leave it, the stronger it gets.
MOGA
When a bar bills itself as Izakaya-inspired, all it's really saying is that it's meant to be casual and social, with an emphasis on drink variety and shareable plates. These days, that's most bars. But Moga gets its name from a contraction of 'modan garu' ('modern girl') from Japan's Taisho era from 1912 to 1926, referring to women who went against the grain. Its Breaking the Norm menu captures that defiant energy with flavour combos as adventurous as their playful names.
If you've grown bored of negronis, you might have moved on to boulevardiers (where gin is replaced by whisky). And if those have lost their spark too, Shiso Funny could be the pick-me-up you need. Whisky, vermouth, and Campari meet shiso-plum liqueur for an aromatic twist that wakes up the palate. Elsewhere on the menu, Is It Mary offers a slightly sweet, slightly sour spin on the Bloody Mary — with a brilliant Togarashi-spiced rim that perfectly primes you for dishes like hamachi collar grilled with kicap manis, chicken karaage with yuzu mayo, and crispy squid seasoned with sansho fish sauce.