The World's Next Great Cocktail Capital Is in Southeast Asia

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).