Cocktails With No Menu: the Bar Stories Story at Li’l Habibi

There are two ways to order a drink from us, and they are nothing alike.

At 29 Hamilton Road you get a printed list. Olive or Nothing, Levant, S.S.S., Ume & Bitter, Matcha Milk, the Aomori Amazeballs — you read the builds, you pick one, it arrives as described. You can look the whole thing up on our drinks menu before you leave the house.

At Li’l Habibi, our smaller sibling at 55 Haji Lane, there is no list at all. The last line of the food menu says it plainly: “All drinks provided by Bar Stories.” Li’l Habibi occupies the site we started in back in 2020, and it shares that address with a cocktail bar that has spent years not printing a menu.

Who Bar Stories are

Bar Stories sits at 55–57A Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, and opens Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm to 10.30pm — the same hours Li’l Habibi keeps, because it is the same building. Their own description of what they do is short: “Original, bespoke cocktails crafted in a relaxed, minimalist setting with an intimate bar,” built from “the freshest ingredients, the finest spirits, and an array of artisan bitters, infusions, and extracts.”

The tie-up is not a marketing arrangement either party is shy about. The FOOD tab on Bar Stories’ own website points at us. We put their name on our menu. If you have read our guide to drinking on Haji Lane, you have already met them there as a venue; this post is about the format rather than the address.

How a bar with no menu actually works

You sit down. Nobody hands you anything. A bartender asks what you feel like — and that is the entire interface.

What comes back is built for you on the spot, which is why the drinks tend to lean on whatever is genuinely around: writers covering the bar over the years have noted gula melaka, red date syrup and ginger turning up alongside local flowers and berries. There is no house list to defend, so the same request on two different nights can produce two different drinks.

This is disorienting the first time. A menu does a lot of quiet work — it tells you the price bracket, it tells you the house style, and it gives you something to hide behind if you do not know much about spirits. Take all three away and the order becomes a conversation, which some people find delightful and some people find like being asked to perform.

What to say when there is nothing to point at

The trick is that you do not need cocktail vocabulary. You need four pieces of information, and you almost certainly already have them:

• A base spirit, or a refusal. “Gin,” or “anything but whisky.” Either is useful.
• A direction. Sour, bitter, sweet, herbal, smoky, fruity. One word is enough.
• A strength. “Something long and easy” and “something short and strong” send you to opposite ends of the room.
• One thing you hate. This is the most valuable sentence you can offer. Coriander, aniseed, egg white, too much sugar — say it upfront and you have removed the only real risk in the format.

If you are still stuck, name a drink you like and let them go from there. “I usually order a negroni, surprise me” is a complete brief.

And you are allowed to say the first one was not for you. A bar that builds to order can only calibrate if you tell it what missed.

Why it suits charcoal food

There is a practical reason this pairing works, and it is not romance.

Li’l Habibi’s kitchen is skewers and smoke — chicken hearts, Iberico pork jowl, beef chuck, jujeh chicken wings, mortadella, all off the charcoal, plus lamb ribs, şiş tawook and mackerel kebabs from the sharing section. That food moves. It arrives hot, in stages, over a couple of hours, and what you want to drink at skewer three is rarely what you wanted at skewer one.

A printed list forces you to guess that in advance. A bartender who can see your table does not have to. Ask for something to cut through after the pork jowl and you will get something built for that job.

What to eat while you decide

Order the mezze first, because it buys you time. Li’l Habibi’s spread runs babaganoush with keropok chicken skin, chickpea hummus with macadamia tahini and ikura, mentaiko taramasalata, and roasted pepper with smoked shimeji and sheep’s feta — or the GIMME ALL!!! platter, which the menu says feeds two to three, “but definitely not 4.”

Then work through the skewers. If choosing is the thing you came here to avoid, there is a FEED ME chef’s-choice menu for a minimum of two people, and you can hand the whole evening over — food to the kitchen, drinks to the bar, and no decisions left to make.

The honest part

Bespoke is not automatically better. It is a format, and formats suit different people. Opinions on made-to-order cocktails are genuinely mixed — some drinkers love the collaboration, others would rather read a list, know the price, and get exactly the thing they pictured. Both are reasonable positions and we are not going to tell you the drinks are the best in Singapore, because that is not a claim anybody can make on your behalf about a drink that does not exist until you ask for it.

What we will say is that it is a genuinely different evening from ours up the road. If you want a known quantity, Hamilton Road prints its list. If you want to find out what somebody makes of “something bitter, long, not too sweet, and I hate aniseed” — that is a Haji Lane night.

Practical notes

• Where: 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248. Li’l Habibi and Bar Stories share the address.
• When: Tuesday to Sunday, 5.30pm–10.30pm. Evenings only — this is not a daytime spot, so if you are on the street before dark see our Haji Lane café guide instead.
• Money: food prices are printed on Li’l Habibi’s menu, and it adds 10% service charge plus 9% GST. Drinks are quoted at the bar, which is worth remembering if you are the sort of person who likes to know before you commit — just ask.
• Booking: it is a small room. Weekends fill.

If you would rather the version with a printed list, a charcoal grill and a full dining room, that is us at 29 Hamilton Road — book a table, Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm. Pictures of both are on the gallery.

More on the two addresses: why we moved, five years of Habibi-san, and where to eat on Haji Lane.