The Amoy Street Bar That Won't Take Your Booking Online
Vijay Mudaliar's regional-Asian cocktail bar sits four floors up an Amoy Street shophouse, ranked among the world's best, and still bookable only by phone.
The Coffee cocktail arrives dark and slow and tastes of rum and something the room won't quite name — the fermentation programme upstairs has done work on it. This is the sort of drink Native is built to serve: regionally rooted, technically strange, made from Southeast Asian spirits and foraged produce and things the bar has been sitting on for months. It is not a cocktail bar in the London-New York classic sense. It is a specific argument about what a Singapore bar can be, and the argument has been ranked No. 84 on the World's 50 Best Bars 51-100 list in 2025, No. 67 in 2024, and 4th on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2019.
Vijay Mudaliar opened it as a shophouse on Amoy Street with a sustainability spine — low waste, regional craftsmen, housemade everything — and it runs across multiple floors, with a third-floor fermentation tasting room most first-time drinkers never find. The ground floor is where the crowd stacks up. The room upstairs is where the actual thesis lives.
A bar making the most interesting cocktails in Singapore, sold through a phone number, with the best room hidden a flight above the crowd.
Editorial Deep
The spirit selection leans hard on Southeast Asian producers — arrack, regional rums, distillates most cocktail bars in the city do not stock — and the housemade ingredients are the point rather than a garnish story. This is a programme with a thesis, executed by a team that has been refining it since Mudaliar opened the room. Against the Singapore field, it is doing work no other bar is attempting at this level.
Sit upstairs if you can get up there. The ground floor is where the noise and the shoulder-to-shoulder happens; the top floor is where the bar is actually best understood. Get there at six when it opens if you want the third floor without waiting for a seat to clear.
Order this
Drink this.
Coffee (rum-based); Chasing the Dragon
“Go for the third-floor fermentation room and the two cocktails that argue Mudaliar's thesis best. Skip if you want a long night on classics.”
Native is doing the most distinct cocktail work in Singapore, and the room upstairs is the one to find. Book by phone, arrive at six, ask for the third floor. If it's full, walk to Spiffy Dapper.
The Verdict
