We recently visited Bar Us on a Monday expecting it to be a quiet night, but it was almost a full house. This is actually a good sign. We were handed the menu and glancing through the first couple of pages we saw words like “chicken stock”, “beef+onion”, “soba”, “ramen”, fish soup”, “satay”. Surely they handed us the food menu, was our initial thought. The waitstaff said “No no, that’s our cocktail menu”. Upon closer look we realised that all these items were indeed drinks. This had us in total intrigue. What are these cocktails that are going to taste like food? Curiosity builds.
The idea is that the menu is very much like a food menu, the first page is the starters page, with lighter tasting cocktails that you can commence your course with. Next is the mains page, where the flavours are going to be heavier and more packed with umami. Third page is the dessert page, this won’t have the savoury profile of the previous pages but are nice palette cleanser that are sweeter. And lastly the fourth page contain classic cocktails for those who are more conventional.
So we started off by ordering the soba highball, the beef + onion, and the ramen cocktails. The soba one was indeed the lightest of the three. It’s really a half way point being a soba dipping broth and a cocktail; the light brownish colour is a good clue of how it was going to taste. First sip will hit you with the savouriness first, and then follows the alcohol. Every sip you can’t help but think that you are sipping that broth that you’ve had before in a soba shop. Next the beef + onion looked the most inconspicuous of the three, being colourless but with some powdery dust on the side of the glass. The taste that I’m immediately reminded of when I sipped this was dashi, which is not one of the ingredients listed. Strangely I just didn’t get any tint of beef here, but maybe that’s a good thing. The star of the three was definitely the Ramen cocktail, which came with a side plate of pickled ginger and chopsticks. The colour was creamy white, which will remind a lot of people of Tonkotsu ramen broth, albeit with a big round ball of ice in the middle of the bowl. This was savoury with a tint of ginger spicy note, umami packed but with a complex combination of very smooth gin. It was truly memorable, and not in that gimmicky have it once kind of way. In fact I would probably come back here just to have this cocktail again.
We did try other cocktails from the dessert menu too, while nice and fragrance they didn’t quite have the intrigue and wow factors of the mains and starters. The fish soup cocktail was another savoury one we tried and this was also delicious. This one also tasted like dashi, as it should be seeing as katsuobushi is the primary ingredient.
Over all, the experience at Bar Us was unique and truly interesting. It’s a super creative cocktail menu that foodies would love. And if you are like me – someone who isn’t into sour heavy on the lime juice kind of cocktails or really sweet syrupy drinks, and on top of that is more of a foodie than a drinker – you will definitely appreciate these creations.
