Drink samsu poured from a Chinese medicine bottle at Sin Hiap Hin
A 1920s bar dressed as a medicine hall
One room, a handful of stools and a wall of apothecary bottles at 5 Kampung Jawa, a few minutes north of Jonker. Open since the 1920s, still pouring local rice spirit by the glass.
Why it's unique
Sin Hiap Hin is a single-room timber shop on Java Lane that has been serving drinkers since the 1920s and looks like a traditional medicine hall, which is roughly what it was disguised as. It sells Melaka samsu, a local rice spirit, infused with lychee, rose and other flavours and decanted from old apothecary bottles, plus a coconut spirit called kokus. Lee Lian Suan runs it, having taken it over from her father-in-law.
National press cannot point to another surviving pre-war Chinese samsu bar in the country, and the samsu itself is a local product, so the drink and the room are the same claim. There is no menu: you say what you want and the auntie pours it out of the bottle.
Before you go
It shuts early. This is a daytime and early-evening bar rather than a night one, and by 7pm you are likely looking at a shutter.
There is no menu; you say what you want and the auntie pours. Drinks are a few ringgit, cash only, and it is not halal. It is one small room with a handful of stools and the regulars are old men who have been coming for decades, so it is a place to sit quietly rather than to bring a group to.