We’re always pleased when we hear about bars that focus on Asian ingredients. The flavours are familiar and comforting, but if one is willing to be creative, can be combined to form original- and very delicious- tipples.
We’ve seen this done successfully at Nutmeg and Clove and Native, and found ourselves in love with local tastes all over again.
So when we checked out new bar Indigenous Bartender HQ (IBHQ), we were excited, to say the least.
Loving Local
The team behind the new bar are no greenhorns. Kamil Foltan, a bar industry veteran who hails from the Czech Republic, is the mastermind behind IBHQ.
Kamil, who has spent many years of his decade-long career in Singapore, has grown to love the culture, ingredients and flavours in Asia, which manifests in physical confines of the bar.
We see a stone tray used in traditional Chinese tea-ceremonies sitting on the bartop, repurposed as a cocktail-making surface. The bar itself has a East-meets-West, traditional teahouse-meets-bar vibe. There’s a simple Japanese style bar counter, plush leather chairs, lantern-like lamps- all within the confines of a Straits shophouse.
Needless to say, we love it already.
The Ingredients of Success
Naturally, the focus in on the ingredients, rather than decor. Kamil explains that IBHQ’s philosophy is to focus on the feeling rather than slavish devotion. He and his team looks at the human and cultural context, the day-to-day uses of the ingredient, culinary or otherwise.
While there is a lot of excitement around elaborate, sometimes gimmicky concept-driven menus, the approach here is more elemental, more focused on the flavour itself.
Each raw ingredient is scrutinised, a way of expressing it is hypothesised, and trial and error is performed until the best execution is found. To assist with their arduous task, the team has a rotary evaporator (rotovap), a rather expensive piece of equipment used in molecular gastronomy. Using a form of distillation, the rotovap can isolate and extract flavours from just about anything.
It’s a rather difficult tightrope to walk; too little focus and the flavour is diluted. Too much focus and it dominates the entire drink and unbalances it, to its detriment. How often have we had truffle dishes which might as well have the pungent, earthy fungus as its only ingredient?
So how do the drinks taste?
We started off with a Strawberry Royal ($24++). A take on the Kir Royale, its base is a strawberry shrub- a solution of balsamic vinegar and strawberries.
The final cocktail tastes like a liquid strawberry shortcake, full of biscuit and yeast from the champagne , and a dark, sweet, jammy flavour akin to strawberry preserve.
We then moved on to the Kochi-ken($22++), a Japanese-style take on the French 75, but with yuzu-infused vodka taking the place of gin.
The curious thing is that our focus was not on the French 75, but the yuzu itself. The citrus fruit, indigenous to China and Japan, has an unmistakable aroma and taste that rose to the top of the cocktail.
It is one of our favourite flavours, and thanks to magic of the rotovap, we were able to enjoy it in customised cocktails, such as a tasty Yuzu Negroni.
Now, this we thoroughly enjoyed. A variant on the White Negroni, but with yuzu at its heart. While we wouldn’t call it subtle, it’s a perfectly balance of fresh citrus and bittersweet herbal notes. Other combinations are possible, of course, provided one has ideas blooming in the fertile ground of one’s mind.
Ourselves, we prefer a guide much of the time. And the PiPa shows why. It’s an experimental drink that has nothing to do with the Chinese cough syrup, being instead a portmanteau of pineapple and parsnip.
Till now, we’re not quite sure whether we love it or hate it.
Kamil tells us that the PiPa found its genesis at the dinner table, from a bowl of parsnip soup, to be precise.
The herbal, vegetal notes that one finds in a cream of vegetable do indeed travel to the tongue, but it also gives off earthy nuances as it morphs slowly into the sweet, tropical shades of caramelised pineapple. The shift is so subtle that, much like Siamese twins, we couldn’t tell where one flavour ended and the other began.
It’s a little disorienting, for sure, but the two queer bedfollows make for a dynamic duo. We might not drink it all night, but even now, weeks after we tasted it, the memory remains indelible.
Summing it all up
We could best sum up our experience at IB HQ in one word: elemental.
The cocktails we tasted are by no means bad, nor one-note, but the individual flavours showcased in each are clear, distinct, and unmistakable. Bold and upfront; like billboards, not signatures.
There’s still plenty of potential to be tapped. We’re excited to see where the team goes next.
