Long Bar, Raffles Hotel

The Singapore Sling is usually credited to Ngiam Tong Boon, a bartender at the Long Bar in the Raffles Hotel, around 1915. The story goes that he made his house gin sling pink so that women, who couldn't respectably be seen drinking in public, could drink it as if it were fruit juice. Not everyone agrees: the drinks historian David Wondrich argued the drink is from the 1890s, and only connected with Raffles in the 1920s.

The original recipe was lost after the hotel stopped serving it in the 1930s; the one poured now was rebuilt from a note a visitor made in 1936. The bar itself has moved too, from the hotel lobby to the shopping arcade next door. The custom that survives is the peanuts: the shells go on the floor.