At Cat Bite Club, agave and Asian rice spirits take centre stage in a mischievously serious cocktail programme that proves education and irreverence can — and should — share the same glass.
There are some cocktail bars that believe dim lighting and a slab of marble are substitutes for character. You know the sort: a hushed reverence, solemn-looking bartenders who look as though they are about to perform minor surgery, and a drinks list that reads like someone had too many words for very little to say.
Cat Bite Club, as we found out when it first opened back in 2023, is not that kind of bar.
Tucked behind drapes within a lifestyle retail store and cafe on Duxton Road, it greets you with a Cheshire-cat grin and a drinks programme that reads frankly unhinged. Especially with its latest menu drop.
Chilli oil-washed mezcal? Scallion oil in a cocktail? Ube and baijiu sharing a glass? It sounds like the sort of thing dreamt up in the aftermath of a drunken late night session… which it probably was.
And yet, it works.
Like its debut menu, the latest offerings at Cat Bite Club are organised with almost missionary zeal around two spirit categories — agave and rice — except this time they are in distinctly separate sections instead of both riffing on a classic cocktail.
Take Get The MSG?, a name that suggests mischief and unexpected flavours. On paper it reads like a dare, built around chilli oil-washed cupreata mezcal and Szechuan peppercorn tomato cordial. In the mouth, it is savoury, gently smoky, and thrillingly structured — the chilli warmth and tomato umami playing against the mezcal’s vegetal snap. The optional neat pour alongside it is a clever flourish; suddenly the smoke and minerality of the agave distillate come into sharp relief.
Straight Outta Scallion — yes, really — folds koji spirit, black garlic and scallion oil into a drink that tastes far more composed than its name or ingredients suggest. It’s the savoury, gastronomic-forward drink that’s become increasingly popular in cocktail drinking circles. Or how about Ube Noir, which combines Chinese baijiu with black sesame, Filipino ube cream liqueur and amontillado, and sounds — and smells — altogether like a dim sum dessert cart colliding with an Asian distillery? And yet the baijiu’s fragrant lift slices through the richness, leaving something improbably balanced.
Then there’s Dill With It, a liberal Mezcal take on the Martini that also uses Sotol — a non-agave distilled spirit from Mexico — along with dill, celery and pear, offering floral and anise notes that accentuate the spirit bite.
For those less adventurous, you’d be thankful the ever-popular Cat Bite Margarita has been retained on the menu. Otherwise Puss In Boot is a tequila-based clarified milk punch that’s sweet with maple and cinnamon balanced by guava.
So no, Cat Bite Club does not fit the mould of the serious modern cocktail lounge. There are no smoke-filled cloches to be theatrically lifted, no rotary evaporators spinning technological tales in this dive-like bar. Instead there’s a deep bench of agave and Asian spirits — tequila, mezcal and their agave cousins on one side; soju, baijiu and koji-based distillates on the other — and a dogged insistence that these categories deserve attention.
Indeed the Asian spirits page is where Cat Bite Club does something genuinely important. In Singapore — and indeed much of Asia — soju and baijiu are cultural fixtures, often consumed with ritual rather than reflection. Here, they are given the same respect typically reserved for rare Scotches or artisanal rums.
In fact, the bar offers a ‘Spirits Explorer Passport’, which invites guests to log their tastings across more than 200 bottles in exchange for prizes (and, should you prove indefatigable, a lifetime discount). It could easily feel gimmicky. Instead, it feels like a loyalty programme for the curious. It rewards repetition. It nudges you to try that small-batch mezcal you cannot pronounce, or the rice distillate you have only ever encountered at a wedding banquet.
So order a neat pour of the base spirit — alongside your cocktail — for a modest supplement, effectively turning your night out into a side-by-side seminar. But with a tone that’s playful rather than pedagogical. This is education with a wink and a drink.
In a bar scene increasingly prone to global sameness — where you can order a clarified milk punch in London, Lisbon or Los Angeles and struggle to tell the difference — Cat Bite Club’s stubborn specificity on agave and rice spirits is refreshing.
Sure, you may not love every drink. That would be suspicious. But you will leave having tasted something that expanded your vocabulary of flavour, and perhaps your understanding of what a cocktail bar can be.
[Photo credits: Cat Bite Club | Allyson Chin]
Cat Bite Club
Address 75 Duxton Rd, Singapore 089534 (Google Maps link)
Opening Hours 5pm to 12am daily
Web catbiteclub.com
Instagram @catbiteclub
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