50

Nutmeg & Clove

Singapore

Heritage Singapore flavours and modern craft with a community focus

Nutmeg & Clove draws on the flavours and places woven into Singapore's fabric – the 'mama shop' under your block, the herbalist with drawers of dried roots, the ice cream cart rattling down the street in decades past. Founder Colin Chia and head bartender Sim Sze Wei capture those moments, pouring them into cocktails that make sense whether you lived them or not.

Now in its 11th year and third home, the current incarnation can seat about 50 – or 60 if everyone shuffles up, and it's the kind of place where you don't mind making room for soon-to-be new friends.

The menu salutes people from the bar's own community – 12 locals it has worked with, including the tailor who makes their bright pink uniforms and the rattan craftsman behind their stools and lampshades. Each is honoured with a cocktail inspired by, or incorporating, their craft.

Kid Me Not draws on the 'mama shops' that anchored every few blocks in 1970s–80s housing estates, folding the flavours of sarsaparilla sodas, hawthorn sweets and the five-spice his mum used to ask him to buy into a sparkling highball homage to those corner-store treasures.

For Dirty Kopi, they buy beans from one of Singapore's heritage kopi roasters – kopi being the local style of dark, intensely bitter coffee that pre-dates the modern high-acidity single origin specialists – and turns them into a cold brew enriched with rum and cherry, with a warm sesame foam the colour of wet concrete that gives the drink its cheeky name. 

Contact