The Best Places to Drink and Stay in City Hall

A white bubble chandelier consumes nearly half the lobby ceiling at this large luxury hotel in the City Hall district, which should tell you something about the scale of ambition here. Twelve restaurants and bars, a full-service spa, a pool, and accommodations that leave little reason to venture out, though the Raffles City mall directly below removes that excuse entirely. Singapore's mix of cultures shows up in the details if you look for them.

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Two heritage buildings in Singapore's Civic District, one neoclassical and one Edwardian, were knitted together into a single 157-room hotel, and the all-white façade designed by Richard Meier stops people on Stamford Road. Inside, the restoration kept the original bones and layered in Italian marble and Travertine columns without tipping into theme-park grandeur. A quieter, more architecturally considered address than the tower hotels nearby.

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Peanut shells still litter the floor by design, a nod to the colonial-era habit the Long Bar has kept alive across its many renovations. This is the cocktail bar where the Singapore Sling was born, and the drink is still made here, for better or worse, by the thousands. The rattan and slow-turning ceiling fans give it the feel of a Graham Greene novel, and the tourists who pack every stool know exactly what they've come for.

1. Difford's Guide 2 stars · Difford's Guide
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Philip Starck designed this hotel, and the interiors make sure you know it, with deliberately odd furniture pieces sitting alongside rotating digital artworks. Rooms look out over Marina Bay, putting Gardens by the Bay and the waterfront within easy walking distance. The neighborhood pulls hard, so it takes some discipline to linger, but the lobby alone gives you a reason to slow down before heading out.

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A 13-metre living wall anchors the lobby of this Marina Bay hotel, part of a design concept that folds more than 2,400 plants into the building rather than around it. The sunlit atrium and neutral-toned rooms lean into an eco-wellness mood that could feel precious but mostly doesn't. Book The Gnome's Burrow or Treehouse rooms if you have children to impress, complete with bunk beds and wooden slides.

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The cocktail menu at this sleek Fairmont hotel bar is organized by mood rather than spirit, which sounds like a wellness gimmick until you're actually choosing between Confident, Indulge, and Reset at ten on a Friday. The drinks are genuinely considered, leaning into fermented ingredients and unexpected pairings. A five-star bar could coast on atmosphere alone; this one seems unwilling to.

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Every cocktail on the menu is named for a literary figure who passed through Raffles, so you'll order something attributed to Conrad or Kipling and feel faintly erudite about it. This is a boutique hotel cocktail bar, quieter and more intimate than the famous Long Bar down the hall, with a tightly curated list built around that conceit. It's the kind of place where the theme actually shapes the drinks rather than just naming them.

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Finding this Peranakan dining room means wandering the National Gallery past a lot of oil paintings, which at least counts as pre-dinner culture. The cooking is Chinese-Malay and tastes like a good grandmother's, with fancier plating and a view over the Padang. Some classics run tamer than the hawker versions, while the twists, like laksa cream over baked cod or a meatless rendang, are where it gets interesting.

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2. The Infatuation The Best Restaurants & Bars To Eat And Drink At When You're Visiting Singapore

Seventy-odd floors above Singapore, this cocktail bar at the top of Swissôtel The Stamford watches the city sprawl all the way to the horizon through floor-to-ceiling windows. The lights, the freeways, the towers below give it a faint Vegas energy, softened nightly by live music. The drinks list is serious, and the bar snacks lean toward the luxurious end of the menu.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

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