Native Marks Ten Years With Time, A New Menu That Asks What Happens When Innovation Slows Down

Sep 10

6 min read

After a decade of challenging where a world-class cocktail bar could look for inspiration, Native turns to ageing, fermentation, preservation and patience—using time itself as an extractor of flavour.

Mamung Butter

A New Cocktail from Native’s latest Cocktail Menu

When Native opened its doors on Amoy Street in 2016, it did so with a conviction that was less commonplace than it is today: that a world-class cocktail bar did not need to look elsewhere for inspiration. Founder and Co-Owner Vijay Mudaliar looked closer to home, with Asian ingredients, cultures, producers and stories becoming the foundation of Native. Ten years later, Native marks a decade of that philosophy with Time, their latest menu that once again questions what progress behind the bar can look like.

For its tenth year, Native is choosing to slow down. Rather than asking what more technology can do, Time explores what an ingredient can become when given patience, care and room to change, treating time itself as an extractor of flavour. Using old-school techniques, simple vessels and slow processes, aging, fermentation, oxidation, curing and slow extraction take the place of immediacy.

Instead of forcing ingredients to give up their flavour, Native gives them time and space, allowing flavour to emerge naturally over days, weeks and sometimes months. The menu proposes a different idea of innovation: progress does not always require more technology or complexity. Sometimes, it comes from restraint.

A Decade Of Looking Closer To Home

Level 2 Main Bar

Native began as an independent, owner-operated bar at a time when there were relatively few of its kind in Singapore. Funding was limited, support for its ideas was not always easy to find, and regional produce was often perceived as inferior to ingredients sourced internationally.

When Native first welcomed friends and family through its doors, the space was not fully finished. The attic above the main bar would remain untouched for months until the team could afford to renovate it.

What Native did have was an idea it was unwilling to compromise on.

The bar allowed ingredients, memories, cultures and stories to lead its cocktails rather than treating established classics as the necessary starting point. It experimented with fermentation and koji, found new purposes for peels, pulp, seeds and other overlooked parts of ingredients, and championed flavours from Singapore and across Asia as worthy of the same attention afforded to those from further afield.

“When we opened Native, we wanted to challenge the belief that world-class quality had to come from somewhere else,” says Vijay. “We wanted to show that exceptional produce, flavours, people and stories could be found within our own region, and that a bar could be an honest expression of its identity rather than follow what was trending elsewhere.

Over the decade that followed, Singapore itself evolved into one of the world's leading cocktail cities, with an increasingly diverse community of bars expressing their own cultures, identities and perspectives. Many of the ideas Native was once questioned for — regional ingredients, fermentation, low-waste thinking, unconventional methods of flavour extraction and identity-led bartending — are now familiar within contemporary cocktail culture.

That experimental instinct also extended to the tools and techniques behind its drinks. Native was an early adopter of equipment such as rotavaps and centrifuges, exploring how technology could further develop flavour. Many of those tools and increasingly complex processes are now commonplace across the cocktail industry. Yet after ten years of learning how to extract flavour faster, the bar arrived at a different realisation: some of the best flavours take time.

For Native, the tenth anniversary is therefore less about looking back at what it has achieved than considering what comes next.

Time: Letting The Ingredient Lead

Across Time, familiar ingredients are transformed not by adding more, but by allowing natural processes to reveal new dimensions. Each cocktail explores a distinct relationship with time—from fermentation and preservation to curing, ageing and slow extraction.

Level 3 Fermentation Room

This fascination with transformation is not new to Native. On the third floor, the bar’s dedicated fermentation room houses a private collection of jars tracing its work over the past decade, with some evolving since Native opened in 2016. What began as an exploration of how fermentation could unlock new flavours has become a living archive of the bar’s curiosity, with some experiments measured not in days or weeks, but in years. For Time, that decade-long fascination with transformation takes on new forms.

From left to right:

Nashigaki, Chempedak Carajillo

PRESERVED — NASHIGAKI

Air-dried and hand-massaged over 14 days

In Nashigaki, Native takes inspiration from the Japanese tradition of hoshigaki, in which persimmons are slowly air-dried and massaged by hand to concentrate their natural sugars and flavour. Here, the same process is applied to nashi pear.

Guests will find the pears hanging around the bar, where the Native team climbs up every couple of days to massage each fruit by hand as it gradually becomes softer, sweeter and more concentrated. Even the discarded skins are given another purpose, transformed into an oleo saccharum before being brought together with calamansi and gin.

AGED — CHEMPEDAK CARAJILLO

Chempedak aged for one to two weeks; buah keluak miso for 24 months

Chempedak Carajillo considers how the character of a single ingredient changes at different points in time. Chempedak aged for two weeks retains a creamy, dessert-like quality, paired with coconut fruit aged for a month which develops a darker richness reminiscent of sticky dates. Both expressions meet house-made buah keluak miso, aged coffee bean, coconut, pandan and spiced rum in Native's Southeast Asian interpretation of the after-dinner classic.

From left to right:

Four Peels, S.C.O.B.Y

FRESH — FOUR PEELS

Citrus slowly extracted through a six-week suspended infusion

Time takes a different form in Four Peels, which draws from a traditional method of making limoncello. Yellow Buddha's hand, mikan, yuzu and calamansi are suspended above alcohol rather than steeped directly within it. As temperatures naturally rise and fall, alcohol evaporates towards the fruit before condensing again, gradually carrying its aromas and flavours back into the spirit. Hinoki tea, shiso and Toki whisky complete the highball.

FERMENTED — S.C.O.B.Y.

Roselle kombucha fermented for 12 days, then rested in oak

With S.C.O.B.Y., Native turns its attention to the living culture behind fermentation itself. Barrel-aged roselle kombucha and red plum compote meet gin, while the scoby — typically treated as a means to an end in kombucha production — becomes part of the drinking experience. Its cellulose is softened until it develops a gummy texture reminiscent of nata de coco, before being charred and served warm alongside the cocktail.

Aging Mary

Elsewhere, time appears through tomatoes and baby capsicums cured in miso and gochujang for Aging Mary; mango gently confited in butter extracted from its own kernel in Mamaung Butter; and kumquats slowly blackened under controlled heat until their sharp citrus character develops deeper notes of caramel, dried fruit and marmalade in Blackened Kumquat.

From left to right:

Mamung Butter, Blackened Kumquat

Throughout the menu, Native's long-held approach to low-waste bartending remains present without becoming its premise. Pear skins become oleo saccharum; mango kernels become butter; and a living fermentation culture becomes both ingredient and garnish.

For Native, sustainability has never been about making a leftover feel like a leftover. It is about looking more closely at what is already there and asking what else it might become.

All cocktails are at SGD 26.

The People Who Grew With Native

From left to right:

Vijay, Yong Wei

If Time reflects how Native's approach to ingredients has evolved, its tenth anniversary also reflects the people who have grown alongside the bar.

Among them is Yong Wei, Co-Owner of Native, whose relationship with Native began from the other side of the bar.

He first visited as a guest shortly before joining for a trial shift. The unfamiliar bottles lining Native's back bar and cocktails such as the Oolong Highball and Mekong Cola offered a different perspective on what drinks could be, but it was the hospitality — and the stories connecting each drink to an ingredient, place or culture — that stayed with him.

Over the following eight years, Yong Wei grew with the business, eventually becoming Head Bartender and, later, Co-Owner.

His journey reflects an ambition that has become increasingly important to Native: to create a place where the next generation of hospitality talent can not only learn, but eventually take ownership of what comes next.

“Native is more than just a bar, it is a place where we celebrate our culture, challenge the unknown and bring everything together through genuine hospitality,” says Yong Wei.

For Vijay, that growth has become one of the most meaningful measures of Native's first decade.

“More than the awards or recognition, I am proudest of the people we have met along the way,” he says. “The bartenders who have worked with us, the guests who supported our vision, and the team members who grew alongside Native and eventually became partners in the business. The people you meet, the relationships you build and the person you become matter far more than any award.”

As Native enters its next decade, the bar is strengthening the systems and structures behind the business while protecting what has remained constant since 2016: curiosity, genuine hospitality and respect for the ingredients, cultures and communities around it.

Time, then, is not a retrospective.

It is an expression of how Native has learned to move forward: sometimes by experimenting, sometimes by questioning what has become conventional, and sometimes simply by allowing an idea the time it needs to become something extraordinary. Ten years in the making, Time is Native’s new menu—and the beginning of its next chapter.

Make a reservation here: http://tribenative.com/

*All prices are subject to a 10% service charge and prevailing GST.