Vijay Mudaliar – Native and Analogue

My Life

I was born and raised in Singapore. I originally started bartending to get by financially while attending business school, but it was never a full-time job for me and I liked it that way. After finishing school, I started working desk jobs in corporate companies and startups. I didn’t really enjoy being stuck at a desk though, so I decided to continue to bartend part time on the weekends. From my employer’s perspective, I wasn’t really supposed to do that, so it was a bit of a gray zone, but people at work kind of knew about it and accepted it. It was my little escape from desk life. Even though I earned around 30 percent more in my desk job than as a bartender, I made up my mind one day and decided I’d rather be happy and earn less. So I quit my job as a corporate PA in a mid-size company and have been broke ever since … 😉 I was twenty-four years old at the time. Bartending back then was mostly confined to nightclubs and not so much cocktail bars, but at the time I was trying to move away from clubs and started working in a hotel rooftop bar and later on in a whisky lounge.

“I made up my mind one day and decided I’d rather be happy and earn less”

Vijay Mudaliar

I got a fair share of whisky knowledge from that stint, but soon moved on to work in my first cocktail bar, which was called The Library. It was a good opportunity and I learned a lot. The owner was a Michelin star chef from London. When I started at The Library I had some basic cocktail knowledge about drinks like whisky sour, old fashioned, and negronis, and from there I started working closely with chefs on things like sous vide and other cooking techniques and also on pairings of food and drinks. My time at The Library ended after two years, when I met Luke Whearty. I heard that Luke would come to town, and when he opened Operation Dagger, I immediately applied for a job and got it. I spent two years at Dagger and left before Luke left. Since it had always been a dream of mine to have my own place, I actively started looking for a venue and soon found Native, which I opened with childhood friends in 2016. We only had the upper floor in the beginning, and then in 2022 we started the restaurant below. My second bar, Analogue, opened in August 2021. It was during the height of the Covid pandemic, but we got offered a very good opportunity in the Chijmes neighborhood.

Native

Native is a three-floor bar. The ground floor houses the gastro pub, which features local ingredients and pairs local food with cocktails. The first floor is the cocktail bar, and then the second floor is our fermentation floor. We make our own koji and honey wine on the fermentation floor. Three floors, three menus. The entire menu changes every year, but small changes are made throughout the year. The three floors fit roughly eighty to a hundred people. The location was easy to find: a chef I used to work with was using it as a venue. He didn’t need the first and second floor, so we started with only those. Growing up in the scene here, there are so many good bars, unfortunately a lot of it is a copy paste mishmash of influences from other places like London, New York etc. I wanted to create something else, something truly Singapore.

You should be able to feel the time and place you’re in. Born out of our passion for local and regional produce the goal was to highlight and display what the region has to offer by integrating local ingredients, crafts, and wares into our food and drinks, allowing a wider audience to unlock these oftentimes overlooked areas of Asia. With menu offerings including unusual ingredients sourced through urban foraging, soul food from various corners of the region, and a focus on building a community sharing sustainable practices, Native remains committed to the concept of locality.

Analogue

With Analogue I already had five years of experience from Native. I had never thought about opening a second bar. Usually, someone’s second location is similar to the first, but I had something different in mind. Analogue looks at the food system from a different angle. The idea is to be progressive. We are plant based, because we believe that the world is over farmed. I wanted to focus on this and re-use waste products like plastic. We have tables grown from mycelium; our bar top was 3D printed from recycled plastic. Analogue, as the name suggests, describes a comparison between one thing and the other, in the way that we wanted to show that plants are as good as meat etc. With the synergy between the two concepts of Native and Analogue, I continue to push for ever-new ideas and innovation, while remaining open to sharing knowledge and paving the way for the next generation.

Singapore Recommendations

The Future

It is a bit difficult right now after the turmoil of the last few years. It’s like a washing machine: we were on one path and all of a sudden turned around by 180 degrees. Things are more simple now though, and fun is an important element. Cutting-edge venues are rare. Many people downsized quite a lot. Classics are seeing a rejuvenation, and doing classics in a creative way is also becoming a trend. The way we work will hopefully become the new industry standard. The prep is labor-intensive, true, but this way the work itself is easier than having a crazy night shift with hundreds of different and tiring processes to take care of. We can streamline the work during the shift much better and prep things in a way that is more sustainable energy-wise for the bartender.

Profile

Year born: 1989

Special skill: Handling pressure

Free time: Brazilian Jiu jitsu, good coffee

Bartender since: 2006

Biggest fail: Yesterday

Most significant career step: Opening Native

Favorite cocktail: The next one

Favorite bar: Lyaness, Benfiddich in Tokyo—Ryan is very progressive and out there, I like that. He challenges the industry. The flavors in Benfiddich are crazy and he makes Suze and Campari from scratch with herbals. The Suze Tonic I had there was mind blowing.

Singapore in three words: Progressive, challenging, home

Native Website

Analogue Website

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Images: ©Native & Analogue