"Seated in a grandly arched room dressed in palm leaf wallpaper and tufted leather sofas, I found the Writers Bar—Raffles’s intimate, gentleman-explorer–style haunt—eschewing leather-bound journals and gin gimlets for Moleskines and a thoughtful lineup of eight nonalcoholic cocktails, including an Arabic-influenced zero-proof old-fashioned named for the Ottoman explorer Emin Pasha and bar manager Konstantine Arzumanov’s Strike Slip, a luminous clarification of Lyre’s White Cane spirit with sencha, soursop, and calamansi." - ByAdam Erace