Bar Kap

The House of Tan Yeok Nee was built in the 1880s for a Teochew merchant who, in the bar's own telling, arrived from elsewhere and made his stature through will and enterprise, and it has been a gazetted national monument since 1974. In the years since, the railway took its front land for the station on Tank Road, it served as St Mary's Home and then as the Salvation Army's base, and it has been restored more than once. Bar Kap, opened in August 2026 by GAIA Group, a member of the Karim Group, uses that timeline as its menu. The Kapitan's Archives runs through four eras: Kapitan for Tan Yeok Nee's own time, Station Master for the railway years, Order for the charitable decades, and Dynasty for the present. Each cocktail is paired with an object from an imagined collection, an abacus, a whistle, a medicine drawer, drawn on the menu beside the drink. Honeycombers reviewed it in its August 2026 new-bars round-up and made the point that matters here: each part also includes a zero-proof drink.

Those zero-proof drinks are printed with an empty strength meter rather than sidelined on a separate card, and three of the four are unambiguous. Last Call (S$18), in the Station Master era, is oolong, lemon, roasted barley, honey, chenpi dried mandarin peel, saline and gold. Sister Act (S$18), in the Order era, is white tea, cucumber, coriander, rojak flower, sea salt and quinine. TCM Drawer No.3 (S$18), in the Dynasty era, is a soy milk drink with ginger, honeydew, chestnut honey and gula melaka, and Honeycombers notes it can be spiked with coconut rum on request, which is the version to decline. The fourth, Gong Fu Merchant (S$20) in the Kapitan era, is listed at zero strength with aged tea, fizz, vinegar, black date and rock sugar, but its ingredient line also says amaro; ask whether that is a non-alcoholic amaro before ordering, because the menu does not say. Prices carry service charge and GST on top. The bar opens every day from 5pm to midnight, sits a few minutes from Dhoby Ghaut MRT, and takes reservations online.