Cocktail Spotlight: S.S.S. and Habibi’s Espresso Martini

Our cocktail card runs to eight signature drinks, and two of them sit at opposite ends of it. One is pale, sharp and finished with a rim of seaweed salt. The other is dark, spiced and built on espresso. If you only ever order two things from our bar, these are the pair that show you the whole range.

Here is what is actually in them, read off the card at 29 Hamilton Road — and, as usual, what we are not going to pretend to know.

S.S.S. — yuzu, tequila, dry curacao, seaweed salt rim

The card prints the build as yuzu, tequila, dry curaçao, seaweed salt rim, and the description as: “Fresh, bright, and a little cheeky. Yuzu and tequila mingle with a rim of seaweed salt.”

Underneath it, like every drink on the list, there is a four-tag flavour profile drawn as dots on a scale bar. The S.S.S. carries CITRUSY · UMAMI · TEXTURE · STRENGTH. We will name the tags because they are printed; we will not convert the dot positions into intensity numbers, because the card does not print numbers and inventing them would be a small lie with a confident face.

What is worth saying is that UMAMI is the second tag on a citrus drink. That is not an accident, and it is not a marketing word borrowed for the occasion. It is the seaweed salt on the rim doing the work. Every sip crosses that rim on the way in, so the savoury note arrives first and the yuzu lands behind it.

Yuzu and tequila is the easy half of the idea. Yuzu is more aromatic and less sweet than lemon or lime, agave spirit is grassy and a little peppery, and a dry curaçao bridges them with bitter orange rather than sugar. That combination exists in plenty of bars. The rim is the part that is ours.

Why a savoury rim belongs on a Japanese-Middle Eastern bar list

Salt on a rim is a Mexican idea, seaweed is a Japanese pantry staple, and the drink is being poured in a room where the kitchen runs a Middle Eastern mezze section next to a charcoal grill. That is the house in one glass.

The practical argument is better than the conceptual one. Our food is smoky and salty. A drink that answers it with pure sweetness fights it. A drink with a savoury edge sits alongside it, which is the same reason our mentaiko works as hard as it does across the menu. If you are ordering the S.S.S. with food, put it next to something from the grill rather than something from the dessert list.

Habibi’s Espresso Martini — vodka, espresso, coffee liqueur, cardamom bitter, allspice liquer

The card prints that build exactly as written above, and the description as: “Rich, spiced, and inviting. The best way to enjoy espresso in a martini.” Its four tags are CAFFEINE · SPICED · SWEET · STRENGTH.

The espresso martini is one of the most ordered cocktails on earth and there is no version of this post in which we claim to have invented it. What we did was put two Middle Eastern spices into it. Cardamom bitter and allspice are the difference between our version and the one you had last week somewhere else, and they are the reason the second tag is SPICED rather than, say, BITTER.

Cardamom in coffee is not a novelty. It is how coffee is served across the Levant and the Gulf — pods crushed into the pot, not stirred in after. Putting it into an espresso martini is a small move, not a clever one, and that is why it works: it takes a drink everybody understands and moves it ten degrees toward the food we cook.

The card misspells “liqueur”, and it does it one line under the correct spelling

We have written before about the menu’s typos — the “Brussel” sprouts, the “fuille de brik” — and the rule we set then was to reproduce what the card actually prints and say plainly that it is a typo, rather than quietly correcting it and creating a quote that does not exist.

So: the espresso martini’s build line prints coffee liqueur, spelled correctly. One line below, in the same font, it prints allspice liquer. Two spellings of the same word, one line apart, on the same drink. It is our favourite of the set for exactly that reason — there is no arguing it is anything but a slip, because the control is sitting right above it.

It is not the only one. The card also prints cream liquer on one drink and lychee liquer on another, and spells cappuccino as CAPPUCINO on the coffee list. None of it changes what is in the glass. All of it is on the card, and correcting it at the source is a printer’s job, not a writer’s.

What the card does not tell you, and neither will we

Three things people ask about drinks lists, and three honest answers.

Price. Our cocktails and drinks card prints no prices at all. Neither does the wine and sake list, and neither does the food menu. So we are not going to quote you a cocktail price in a blog post, because we would be inventing it. The food menu does print one line about money — “Prices subjected to 10% service charge. No G.S.T. Woohoo!” — and that is the whole of what our paperwork says on the subject. If budget is the question, we have written separately about ordering strategies.

Strength. STRENGTH is the fourth tag on every one of the eight cocktails, and it is drawn as a dot on a bar. There is no ABV figure anywhere on any of our three menus. We are not going to derive one for you.

Calories. Same answer, shorter: not printed, not estimated, not guessed. The word “alcohol” appears exactly once across all three of our menus, and it is a joke in another drink’s description.

Which one to order, and when

One note on the photograph above: it is a real cocktail on a real table in our dining room, and we are not going to tell you which one, because we cannot tell from the frame. Pale, stemmed and dusted narrows it down without settling it.

The S.S.S. is a first drink. It is bright, it is savoury at the edge, and it does the job an aperitif is supposed to do — it makes you hungrier rather than fuller. Order it while the mezze is landing.

Habibi’s Espresso Martini is a last drink, or nearly. It is sweet, it is caffeinated, and it belongs after the plates have gone rather than before them. If you want to keep the coffee thread running, our matcha-misu is built on 100% arabica and lands in the same territory from the other direction.

Between the two of them sits the rest of the card, which we have been working through drink by drink: Olive or Nothing and Levant, Ume & Bitter and Matcha Milk, and L.S.M. and Aomori Amazeballs. If you would rather drink something that is not a cocktail, our five sakes are here and the case for a highball with grill food is here.

Booking, and the one dietary line

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar. We open Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm, and we are closed on Mondays. You can book a table on Chope or through our reservations page.

Both of these drinks contain alcohol, and the kitchen they are poured next to serves pork. Habibi-san is not halal, and we would rather you knew that from a blog post than from a menu at the table. Our FAQ answers the rest of it.

The full card is on the cocktails and drinks menu, the food it is built to sit beside is on the food menu, and if you want to see the room before you commit, the gallery is here. If this is your first time at a Japanese pub-style dinner at all, start with our guide to izakaya dining in Singapore and work outward.