Raffles Singapore: the Long Bar, the Singapore Sling, its price, the queue and the hours

In the early 1900s, by the Long Bar’s page, the bar stood along Cad’s Alley and was known as «the rendezvous of planters»: its tables faced Bras Basah Road, a vantage point on the street, and rubber and plantation owners from Malaya gathered at the bar at weekends. They were handed peanuts and brushed the shells to the floor, a habit the page still encourages. The hotel’s timeline tells the bar’s past another way: there the Long Bar begins as a counter in the Raffles Ballroom in the 1960s and moves to the Raffles Arcade after the restoration that ended in 1991. Today’s room is on 2 storeys, and the menu ties its décor to Malayan plantation life in the 1920s, down to the punkah fans on the ceiling. Visitors writing in 2026 find a sack of nuts on every table.

The Sling dates from 1915. Etiquette then kept women from drinking alcohol in public: they were served teas and fruit juices while the men had whisky or gin. Ngiam Tong Boon, a Hainanese bartender at Raffles, mixed a gin cocktail that passed for fruit punch, pink from grenadine and cherry liqueur, with pineapple and lime juice, curaçao and Bénédictine. The glass served now lists Brass Lion Singapura Gin, distilled in Singapore, Bénédictine, Luxardo Cherry Sangue Morlacco, Ferrand Dry Curaçao, the house grenadine, both juices and Spice Plantation Bitters. The straw is made of potato starch.

4 other Slings sit beside it. The Singapore Sling Zero, poured since 27 June 2026, is built on Tanqueray 0.0% with the same grenadine, pineapple and lime juice, a Singapore Sling tea and a 48-hour spice tincture, and costs S$38. The Raffles 1915 Gin Sling, which the menu calls the ancestor of the Singapore Sling, is S$36. The Matcha Sling, made for 60 years of relations between Singapore and Japan, is S$38, and the Sakura Sling S$36.

The rest of the list comes at 2 prices. 10 cocktails are S$32 each: 5 listed as Straits Classic Cocktails, among them a Gin Pahit, a Planter’s Punch and a Sour Plum Mojito, and 5 signatures, one of them a Golden Milk Punch for Rudyard Kipling, who by the menu’s account visited Raffles in 1889. 3 alcohol-free «Raffles Refreshers» are S$16 each. By our arithmetic, with the 2 charges, S$32 becomes S$38.37 and S$16 becomes S$19.18.

Visitors’ reviews tell of very different waits. One, writing in February 2026, arrived around 6.30pm and waited a minute or 2. Others write of 15 minutes at 3pm (September 2026), of 20 minutes (February 2026) and of 30 minutes (November and December 2025). One, writing in March 2025, was quoted an hour and a half and went to another bar in the hotel. A visitor writing in April 2026 found the line too long to join. Another, writing in December 2025, had been warned by a guide and drank the Sling at the bar in one of the courtyards instead. The Sling is in 288 of the hotel’s 1,227 most recent Google reviews with a text.

Do people staying at the hotel stand in the same line? 3 residents write of a way past it, 2 of them through the butler: one, writing in March 2025, had the butler’s team arrange a table; one, in November 2025, says residents are advised to ask the butler for priority; one, in March 2026, was seated at once, past «the VERY long queue». The official page names one arrangement, for diners at Butcher’s Block next door, and a guide published on 28 September 2026 writes that there is no separate line for hotel guests. Another resident, writing in October 2025, was offered the welcome Sling in the suite or at the poolside bar, with the Long Bar left off the choices.

The Long Bar is the one with the history, and its page says walk-ins only. Lantern, the rooftop bar of The Fullerton Bay Hotel, opens at 3pm, lists a Fullerton Sling at S$32 before its charges and may hold a card against a reservation.

MO BAR, at Mandarin Oriental, Singapore, looks at the skyline from level 3 and opens at 5pm. Bob’s Bar, at Capella Singapore on Sentosa, opens at noon from Wednesday to Sunday and puts Singapore laksa and Hainanese chicken rice beside the drinks.