When we raise our glasses to Pandan Club’s first cocktail menu, the bartenders laugh. “Finally! This is the first time someone has said cheers at this bar,” one of them chuckles. It has been a long wait.
Manoj Padmanabhan | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Pandan Club, a Peranakan restaurant helmed by Chef Sashi Chelliah of MasterChefAustralia fame, launched in Chennai in December 2022. Over the last year, co-founder Manoj Padmanabhan worked on their non-alcoholic menu, creating a line of craft drinks as they waited for their alcohol license to come through.
This week, they announced the launch of their fully stocked bar (operating under Chennai Best Recreation Club) with a new cocktail menu. Named The Shortest Route, it is a cheerful, flavour-packed journey between India and Singapore. “I wanted to combine local and Asian ingredients so people can travel with just a sip,” says Manoj.
Discussing how Pandan Club’s non-alcoholic craft drinks came together, Manoj said he decided to move away from soft drinks and sugary mocktails and instead build drinks from scratch using fresh, vibrant ingredients, then adding an Asian twist. “For example, we make sugarcane juice with galangal and yuzu instead of ginger and lemon,” he says. The same philosophy has been carried into the cocktail menu, which features six specially crafted drinks, in addition to the classics.
Serangoon Smith | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
“I don’t like to ‘cut copy paste’ ideas, so I spent months building each of these cocktails, making sure each is unique,” he says, ordering a Serangoon Smith. A tribute to the many Indian goldsmiths on Singapore’s Serangoon street, the golden cocktail, served in a long stemmed glass, is a refreshing and potent blend of lemongrass gin, young coconut and gula melaka, a type of palm sugar. It comes with a sugar-spun Singaporean stamp, pressed on a flat square of kamarkattu.
Affair cocktail with sea water | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Fun Chennai elements abound, as Manoj has focussed on story telling with this menu. His most quirky move is incorporating sea water in a steamy cocktail called Affair. “How hard is it to get a bucket of it from Marina beach?” he chuckles, adding that the water is distilled and then added to pandan scotch and palm jaggery. “It gives an elevated taste, instead of just adding salt,” he says.
The cocktails use a slew of modern mixology techniques like sous vide, fat washing and infusion. The bar also works towards being sustainable, dehydrating orange peels for marinades, for example. Cocktails are clean and spirit forward. But what makes them really stand out is their sense of humour.
Cup noodles - the savoury cocktail | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
The savoury Instant noodles cocktail, admittedly an acquired taste, is a good example. Gin is steeped overnight with a pack of noodles and nori, then distilled. It is served cold, with a umami-rich noodle broth, along with addictively salty crackers. “Maybe not everyone will like it,” says Manoj, “But if you want to make an impact, you have to have the courage to be different.”
Pandan Club is at 39, Bazullah Road, Parthasarathi Puram, T Nagar, Chennai. Cocktails start at ₹575 plus tax.
