Penang Road’s skyline has grown a great deal taller since 1885, when Teochew merchant Tan Yeok Nee built what is now the sole survivor of Singapore’s four grand mansions as his private residence. The house went on to serve as a British railway official’s home, then St Mary’s Home and School for Eurasian Girls, then a traditional Chinese medicine clinic – a sequence of occupants that Bar Kap, the new cocktail bar occupying the manse’s ground floor, has turned its entire drinks menu around. The rest of the house has been given new life too, with a restaurant, offices and exhibition space elsewhere on the grounds.
The mood: Heritage restored, reimagined room by room
DP Architects’ restoration of the grand pile keeps the antique timber beams and carved details of the main hall intact, while local design studio Farm adds mirrored surfaces that expand the hall’s sense of scale. A Y-shaped bar console anchors the space, built for watching the pours up close. Two private rooms sit off the hall: the Carriage Room, dressed in fabric and painted brass to suggest a train compartment, and the Chamber, styled after a Chinese medicine apothecary and fitted out to display the bar’s clay-ageing vessels.
The drinks: six cocktails, six eras, one shared history
The menu, developed with Studio Ryecroft, tracks the building’s eras through six cocktails apiece. The Pepper Peddler mixes baijiu, gin and makgeolli into a peppery, chocolate-tinged highball honouring Tan Yeok Nee’s spice trade, whilst the Dynamo, aged in purple clay using an 8,000-year-old technique, layers Irish whiskey, amaro and dark soy into something dense and savoury. The food menu runs a similar arc, from a salmon roe and yuzu granita through Mee Kapitan – a mala-spiked house noodle with pork and shrimp paste – to a rendang-stuffed Bar Kap Bao. After all its previous lives, this house has finally found one worth staying up late for.
Bar Kap is located at 101 Penang Rd, House of Tan Yeok Nee, Singapore 238466