The Armenian Sarkies brothers opened Raffles as a ten-room hotel on 1 December 1887; by 1915 its Long Bar had created the Singapore Sling.
Regent Alfred John Bidwell of Swan & Maclaren designed the main building that followed in 1899, and the hotel became a National Monument in 1987. After a S$160-million restoration it reopened on 16 September 1991. Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Noël Coward are honoured in the Writer’s Bar. The hotel stands on Beach Road in the Civic District, a short walk from City Hall and Esplanade MRT.
In 1915 Raffles bartender Ngiam Tong Boon created the Singapore Sling at the Long Bar, a cocktail designed to look like fruit juice so that women could drink it in public. The other ritual is the peanuts: guests brush the shells onto the floor, a custom traced to Malayan plantation owners who drank here at weekends in the early 1900s.
