Cocktail Spotlight: Ume & Bitter and Matcha Milk

On paper these two have nothing to do with each other. One is bitter, herbal and crisp. The other is a matcha latte that will get you tipsy. They sit four lines apart on the same eight-drink card and between them cover most of what our bar is trying to do.

Here is what is in each, read off the card at 29 Hamilton Road, plus the two ingredients almost nobody asks about and probably should.

Ume & Bitter — gin, gentian, umeshu, pink perilla

That is the build exactly as the card prints it. The description reads: “Bright perilla sweetness meets the gentle bitterness of gentian. Crisp, lively, and full of character.” The four-tag profile is SWEET · BITTER · HERBAL · STRENGTH, drawn as dots on a scale bar that we are not going to translate into numbers, because the card prints no numbers.

Four ingredients, two of which are the reason the drink exists. The gin is structure. The umeshu appears exactly once across our entire offering, and it is in this glass, which is why it has a post of its own and a second on how to order it; we are not making that argument a third time. The gentian and the perilla are the ones nobody asks about.

Gentian: the only bitter root named anywhere on our menus

Gentian is a mountain root. The one that ends up in drinks is Gentiana lutea, the great yellow gentian, which grows in grassy alpine and sub-alpine pastures across central and southern Europe — the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines, the Balkans — at altitudes of up to 2,500 metres. The rhizome and roots are dug in autumn and dried.

Its bitterness is not a figure of speech. The compounds responsible are secoiridoid glycosides, principally amarogentin, which is one of the most bitter natural compounds known — bitter enough that it is used as the scientific reference point against which other bitterness is measured. That is what is doing the work behind the word “gentle” in the card’s description.

In the drinks world the root anchors a small family of French alpine aperitifs — Suze, Salers, Avèze — which PUNCH’s guide to the category traces back to the French Alps and first appearances in writing in the late 18th century, with Suze “the bitterest of the bunch”. Our card says only gentian. It does not name a bottle, so neither will we.

What we can tell you first-hand is how unusual it is on our list. The word “gentian” appears exactly twice across our food menu, wine and sake list and cocktails card combined — this drink’s build, and this drink’s description. There is no other bitter root on the paperwork. If you want bitterness at our bar, this is where it lives.

Pink perilla, and a pairing with a long history

The card prints pink perilla. Perilla is the herb most English menus call shiso, and its green and red forms do quite different jobs: green is the tender leaf you eat fresh, red is the one used for colour rather than eaten raw.

The red form is also, historically, ume’s partner. Umeboshi — salted Japanese plums — get their deep red from red perilla layered in with the fruit. The pigment is an anthocyanin called shisonin, and the leaves turn bright red when steeped in umezu, the sour brine the pickling plums throw off. Without the leaf you get a pale pickle instead.

So a glass containing both umeshu and perilla is not a random pair of Japanese-sounding words. It is a combination that has been sitting in Japanese pickling crocks for centuries, rebuilt as a drink. We will say one thing carefully, though: our card says “pink perilla”, not “red shiso”, and we are not going to tell you which cultivar is in the glass on the strength of a colour word. The history is documented. The specific leaf is a question for the bar, not for a blog post.

Matcha Milk — matcha sake, butterscotch, hazelnut, cream liquer

Again, that is the build verbatim, typo included; more on that below. The description is the shortest on the card and the least serious: “Matcha latte with alcohol—what more can you ask for?” The tags are SWEET · CREAMY · DECADENT · STRENGTH.

That description is also the only place the word “alcohol” appears on any of our three menus, and it is a joke rather than a data point — which is a large part of why we refuse to publish an ABV or a calorie figure for anything we pour. Nothing on our paperwork carries one.

Matcha and hazelnut turn up twice on our paperwork, and both times together

This is the part we did not expect to find when we went back through the menus for this post.

Hazelnut appears exactly once on the food menu and exactly once on the drinks card. On the food menu it is in the matcha-misu: sakari matcha sake, 100% arabica coffee, hazelnut feuilletine. On the drinks card it is here, in Matcha Milk. Two hazelnuts on the whole estate, both standing next to matcha.

That is not a stated house rule — it is what the kitchen and the bar independently arrived at. Matcha is grassy and faintly bitter with a long finish. Hazelnut is round, toasted and sweet without being sugary. One fills in exactly the part of the palate the other leaves empty. If you like the dessert, you will probably like the drink, and the other way round. We have written more broadly about where matcha desserts are worth ordering in Singapore if you want the wider view.

On the bottle itself: the card says only matcha sake and does not name it. There is exactly one matcha sake on our list, so the inference is short — but it is an inference, and we set that out properly in the post about the Sakari rather than writing a sentence more certain than the paperwork.

The card misspells “liqueur” here too

Matcha Milk’s build line prints cream liquer. It is one of three on the card, and we handle all of them the same way: reproduce what is printed, say plainly that it is a typo, and do not invent a quote by silently correcting it. The full set, and the reason one of them is impossible to argue with, is in the post on the S.S.S. and Habibi’s Espresso Martini.

And the dash in “Matcha latte with alcohol—what more can you ask for?” is a real em dash set tight with no spaces, not the two hyphens a text extractor will hand you.

When to order which

Ume & Bitter is an opener. Bitter and herbal is what an aperitif is for — it sharpens appetite instead of dulling it — and it holds up against salt and smoke, which is most of what our kitchen sends out. Put it beside the mezze while the grill gets going.

Matcha Milk is the other end of the evening entirely. It is sweet, creamy and unapologetic about it, and the honest way to order it is as dessert, or alongside one, rather than as a drink you sip through dinner. If you are choosing between it and the matcha-misu, order both and share; they are the same idea in two states of matter.

The rest of the card is covered drink by drink: Olive or Nothing and Levant, S.S.S. and Habibi’s Espresso Martini, and L.S.M. and Aomori Amazeballs. If you would rather drink the sake straight than in a cocktail, all five of ours are here.

Booking, and one honest line

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar. Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Closed Mondays. Book on Chope, or through our reservations page.

Both drinks are alcoholic and our kitchen serves pork. Habibi-san is not halal and never presents itself as such; the FAQ covers the rest. The full drinks list is on the cocktails and drinks menu, the room is in the gallery, and if you are new to this style of eating and drinking altogether, start with our izakaya guide.