There are sustainability-minded bars, and then there is Fura. Jaded with bar culture’s often wasteful status quo and eager to raise awareness about the future of food, partners in life and business Sasha Wijidessa and Christina Rasmussen (who was former head forager at Copenhagen’s Noma) opened their Singapore cocktail bar in October 2023 with a mission to serve provocative and educational food and drinks.
The concept could easily elicit an eye roll from skeptical drinkers, who have witnessed their fair share of greenwashing in the bar industry. But Fura is far from patronizing or superficial. Before developing the menu, the team created an ingredient bank with carbon emissions tediously calculated for each product. The current menu, named The Journal of Future Foods, highlights any ingredient that has “a low carbon footprint” and is either “abundant in nature or out of balance in its ecosystem,” according to Wijidessa. The menu includes “future foods”—or sustainable alternatives to common foods like meat and dairy, such as insect proteins and cell-cultured milk—and uses ingredients derived from invasive species, including jellyfish, or those available in abundance, such as banana or corn.
“We want our guests to feel comfortable and welcomed, but to also offer a space for education if they’re interested,” says Wijidessa. One way they avoid alienating guests is by taking inspiration from well-known flavors like bubblegum: The bar’s Juicy Fruit cocktail is made with rum and several Singaporean tropical fruits like pineapple, jackfruit and bananas. The Caviar Papi, meanwhile, is a cheeky play on the trend of serving caviar bumps with Champagne, and it has unexpectedly become the bar’s best seller.
“Caviar Papi was one of the few drinks on our menu that worked out really quickly,” says Wijidessa of the drink, essentially an elevated ice cream float that features a portion of housemade kombu ice cream gliding atop a Champagne-inspired cocktail.
To make the faux bubbly that serves as the drink’s base, Wijidessa infuses aromatic lemon balm, an abundant plant in Singapore, into green apple juice for two days to mimic wine-like acidity. She combines the augmented apple juice with a toasted coriander seed–infused dry vermouth before fortifying the mix with vodka. The batch is then bottled, force-carbonated and chilled for service.
For the ice cream, Wijidessa infuses a vegan cream with roasted kelp and then mixes it with cell-cultured milk (made in a lab as opposed to being derived from a cow), rice flour, sugar and guar gum. She blends the combination in a Thermomix and processes it in a Pacojet ice cream maker. This frozen addition “introduces another layer to the drink, all while keeping it a super fun experience for our guests,” she says.
All that was missing from the Caviar Papi was its namesake ingredient. To make the “caviar,” Wijidessa adds agar to black garlic stock before dropping it into cold oil (a process known as cold oil spherification). Fura serves the savory, vegan caviar alternative by gently nestling it into the kombu ice cream. It’s also served in a separate caviar tin designed by the bar to replicate the classic blue Russian style. Wijidessa says the serve is meant to raise awareness about the impacts of caviar consumption: Due to farming and hunting, she points out, several species of sturgeon are now endangered.
The Caviar Papi is one of those head-turning cocktails that spreads like wildfire throughout the bar once one guest orders it, not unlike the recent trend of actual caviar and Champagne. Ironically, though, Wijidessa says the drink is “meant to make fun of people gravitating towards the unsustainable ‘bumps and bubbles’ trend that’s shallow and wasteful.” Through this laborious, considered serve, Fura hopes to show guests that they can achieve the same vibe, but with less environmental harm. “With much of our menu, we’re aiming to educate in a fun and lighthearted way,” Wijidessa says. “[It’s] adapt or die. But we’re all going to die anyway, so we might as well have fun while we’re at it.”
