There are bars that care about sustainability, and then there’s Fura. Fed up with the often wasteful status quo of bar culture and keen to raise awareness about the future of food, Sasha Wijidessa and Christina Rasmussen (formerly head of food foraging at Noma, Copenhagen) opened their cocktail bar in Singapore in October 2023 with a mission to serve provocative and educational food and drink.
The concept could easily elicit a disapproving sneer from skeptical drinkers, who have witnessed their fair share of greenwashing in the bar sector. But Fura is far from patronizing or superficial. Before developing the menu, the team created a bank of ingredients with tediously calculated carbon emissions for each product. The current menu, called The Journal of Future Foods, highlights any ingredients that have “a low carbon footprint” and are “abundant in nature or imbalanced in their ecosystem,” according to Wijidessa. The menu features “future foods” (or sustainable alternatives to common foods like meat and dairy, such as insect protein and cell-cultured milk) and uses ingredients derived from invasive species, including jellyfish, or those that are available in abundance, such as banana or corn.
“We want our guests to feel comfortable and welcome, but also offer a space for education if they are interested,” says Wijidessa. One way to avoid alienating guests is by taking inspiration from familiar flavours like bubblegum: the bar’s Juicy Fruit cocktail is made with rum and various tropical Singaporean fruits like pineapple, jackfruit and bananas. Caviar Papi, meanwhile, is a bold take on the trend of serving caviar with Champagne and has unexpectedly become the bar’s best-seller.
“Caviar Papi was one of the few drinks on our menu that worked really quickly,” Wijidessa says of the drink, which is essentially an elevated ice cream float that features a dollop of housemade kombu ice cream sliding over a Champagne-inspired cocktail.
To craft the artificial fizz that serves as the drink’s base, Wijidessa infuses aromatic lemon balm, a plant abundant in Singapore, into green apple juice for two days to mimic the wine’s acidity. He combines the augmented apple juice with a dry vermouth infused with toasted coriander seeds before fortifying the mixture with vodka. The batch is then bottled. force carbonated and chilled for serving.
For the ice cream, Wijidessa infuses a vegan cream with roasted seaweed and then blends it with cell-cultured milk (made in a lab rather than 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, while also making it a super fun experience for our guests,” she says.
The only thing missing from Caviar Papi was its namesake ingredient. To make the “caviar,” Wijidessa adds agar to black garlic broth before dipping it into cold oil (a process known as cold oil spherification). Fura serves the tasty vegan alternative to caviar by gently placing it on top of kombu ice cream. It is also served at a can of caviar apart Designed by the bar to replicate the classic Russian blue style, Wijidessa says the service aims to raise awareness about the impacts of caviar consumption: due to farming and hunting, he notes, several species of sturgeon are now endangered.
The Caviar Papi is one of those cocktails that draws attention and spreads like wildfire throughout the bar when a customer orders it, just like the recent trend of current Caviar and Champagne. Ironically, though, Wijidessa says the drink is “meant to poke fun at people who gravitate toward the unsustainable ‘bubbles and bubbles’ trend that is superficial and wasteful.” Through this thoughtful, laborious service, Fura hopes to show customers that they can achieve the same vibe, but with less environmental damage. “With a lot of our menu, we’re looking to educate in a fun, 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 doing it.”
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