The Best Bars for Nonalcoholic Cocktails in Singapore

It was a typically sticky summer night in Singapore, and Christina Rasmussen held the Strawberry Moon in her hand, condensation racing down the side of the stemless cylindrical flute.

The lunar elixir, from the Ugly Delicious section of Fura’s Journal of Future Foods menu highlighting retail-imperfect ingredients, was a sensory bait and switch. Its pinprick bubbles carried the sweet aroma of strawberry Nerds, but it drank as dry and minerally as a lean limestone rosé. Or rather, fauxsé. The ingredients of this cocktail include: overripe berries, green apples, vanilla, a coconut-oil wash, a CO₂ injection, an ice column, and no alcohol.

In this world-class drinking city—home to four of the World’s 50 Best Bars winners last year—drinkers want nonalcoholic cocktails created with intention and enthusiasm.

Rasmussen, a Danish American who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, set the sparkling barely pink drink on a coaster at Fura, the futuristic Chinatown bar she owns with her Singaporean wife, Sasha Wijidessa. “Singapore’s drinking game’s been on fire since, like, 2016,” Wijidessa said. “It comes from having very educated consumers who drive the market, who are very open, and know what they want.” The two fell in love over cloudberries and limpets in Copenhagen, where Rasmussen worked at Noma and Wijidessa did R&D for the avant-garde liquor label, Empirical. After moving to Singapore and running Fura as a pop-up, they gutted a second-story lounge, and gave it a sustainable renovation with a sapphire recycled-glass bar, lime-washed tangerine ceilings, and flat-pack stools built from construction-site scrap.

You can expect clever non-alcs at idiosyncratic independents like Fura, but zero-proof cocktails also add diversity to the menus at deep-pocketed hotel drinking dens like Raffles Hotel’s Long Bar. The iconic bar, birthplace of the boozy Singapore Sling, tends to hog the cocktail spotlight. Its lesser-known little brother, the intimate Writers Bar, seems to say, “Hold my Emin Pasha,” a zero-proof, Arabic-influenced old-fashioned named for the Ottoman explorer and naturalist.

LeRoy Chan, Raffles’s assistant director of food and beverage marketing, stepped away from the sculptural brass bar to deliver the mixture of Seedlip Spice 94, miso, orgeat, gum and demerara syrups, and a dab’ll-do-ya of extravagant orange-blossom water. “Guests are delighted to see nonalcoholic cocktails made with thought, served in beautiful stemware,” Chan said.

Photograph by Lenne Chai

Photograph by Lenne Chai

As the sun goes down on Chinatown, Monument Lifestyle café turns off its espresso machine and a scarlet Cheshire cat sign flickers awake. Founded by San Francisco best friends Jesse Vida and Gabriel Lowe in 2023, Cat Bite Club is Monument’s nocturnal alter ego. On the menu, each cocktail gets an ABV footnote, and Vida and Lowe developed some of the recipes so Seedlip’s zero-proof spirits could swap in seamlessly while preserving the intended flavor profile—like Notas de Agave in the Hulk Splash, which gets its green color from kiwi and broccoli.

Photograph by Lenne Chai

Take the glass elevators up to the second floor of the Conrad Singapore Orchard to this swanky lounge. A spiritual portal to NYC, it has everything: mirrored ceilings; a rickhouse with barreled vespers and Negronis; a 12-seat Warhol-themed bar-within-a-bar; and strong NA options. From the Seasons of Manhattan menu, head bartender Zana Möhlmann doses tonic with lemon-mushroom oleo saccharum in the Autumn Groove Fizz and echoes spring’s first blossoms with Lyre’s non-alc agave spirit, bee pollen, and rose lychee milk tea in the Blooming Daisy.

Photograph by Lenne Chai

Rasmussen sums up the mission at Fura, which opened in 2023, as “trying to create a new way of eating and drinking where it makes sense for the climate that we’re in.” Here, snacks and cocktails are crafted from invasive or abundant ingredients while embracing a sober-curious ethos. Think sprightly house-made kombuchas in flavors like blackberry-fennel and raspberry-pineapple, and NA cocktails like That Easy, an unusual tart and toasty concoction of wild rice water, apple-sumac cordial, and floral yuzu.

Photograph by Lenne Chai

Photograph by Lenne Chai

Grandly arched, adorned in palm leaf wallpaper, and furnished with tufted leather sofas and objets d’art, this dignified Raffles haunt gives big “gentleman explorer” energy. Leather-bound journals and gin gimlets are out; Moleskines and eight NA cocktails, including bar manager Konstantine Arzumanov’s Strike Slip, a luminous clarification of Lyre’s White Cane spirit, sencha, soursop, and calamansi, are in.