IT'S 5 O'CLOCK SOMEWHERE

A global explosion of cocktail culture has given rise to a creative flowering of inventive drinks made with indigenous ingredients.

- Jason O’Bryan

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 7 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 South 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