World’s best bars in Singapore 2026: A cocktail crawl through the city

There’s a tear in the fabric of Singapore ’s thin, spontaneous nights. The bar hopper, heroic after a few cocktails, sees what seeps through it. Memory stirs with migration, cultures collide, flirt, borrow each other’s spices and leave with one another’s recipes. What emerges is a cocktail without an address, glimmering at the rim of consciousness, its aftertaste impossible to place and hard to forget.

To find out what goes into this elixir, I set out to visit four of Singapore’s bars, two of them — Nutmeg & Clove and Jigger & Pony featured on The World’s 50 Best Bars list 2026. I found that a drink could be a portrait of a place, a private joke, a cultural inheritance and each permitting the barhopper to find zany expressions that melts into ice, flavours and memories - as you will.