Introduction: A Bar That Serves Tomorrow’s Menu Today

In a nondescript Singapore location, a cocktail bar is serving food that doesn’t yet exist in most people’s reality. At Fura, diners can order cultured quail parfait torched onto hazelnut biscuits, sip martinis infused with lab-grown meat, or try coffee made without a single coffee bean. This isn’t molecular gastronomy for spectacle’s sake—it’s a deliberate, carefully curated preview of what humanity’s plate might look like as climate change reshapes our food systems.

Since opening in October 2023, Fura has positioned itself not just as a sustainability-focused establishment, but as an edible laboratory for climate adaptation. Co-owners Christina Rasmussen, formerly head forager at Copenhagen’s legendary Noma, and Sasha Wijidessa have created what they call a “Journal of Future Food”—a living, evolving menu that treats each volume like a chapter in humanity’s dietary evolution.

Beyond Greenwashing: The Philosophy of Anticipatory Eating

Climate Change as Culinary Catalyst

Most restaurants approach sustainability through reduction: less waste, lower emissions, local sourcing. Fura flips this paradigm by asking a more unsettling question: What happens when traditional ingredients become scarce, expensive, or environmentally unconscionable? Rather than waiting for that future, they’re preparing diners for it now.

The bar’s guiding principle reveals this forward-thinking approach: they actively seek ingredients that are “prevalent, invasive or in abundance due to the imbalance of our ecosystem.” This isn’t just about carbon footprints—it’s about recognizing that climate change creates both scarcities and surpluses, and intelligent food systems must respond to both.

Consider the implications: as ocean temperatures rise, jellyfish populations explode while fish stocks collapse. As traditional agriculture struggles with water scarcity and extreme weather, insects and cellular agriculture become not just alternatives but necessities. Fura isn’t advocating for these changes—it’s acknowledging their inevitability and familiarizing diners with what’s coming.

The Noma Legacy: From Foraging to Future Foods

Rasmussen’s background at Noma—the restaurant that revolutionized Nordic cuisine by championing hyperlocal, foraged ingredients—provides crucial context for Fura’s mission. Noma taught the world that unfamiliar ingredients (ants, sea buckthorn, wild herbs) could be not just edible but exquisite when handled with skill and respect.

Fura applies this same philosophy to the next frontier. Just as Noma made moss and fermented grasshoppers desirable, Fura aims to normalize cultured meat, gas-derived proteins, and fermented waste products. The lesson: disgust and desire are cultural constructs that can be reshaped through context, presentation, and taste.

Deconstructing the Menu: Innovation Item by Item

Cultured Quail: The Cellular Agriculture Showcase

The inclusion of Vow’s Forged cultivated quail represents perhaps the most significant technological leap on Fura’s menu. Cellular agriculture—growing real meat from animal cells without slaughter—has been heralded as agriculture’s future for over a decade, yet consumer adoption remains minimal. The technology is expensive, unfamiliar, and psychologically challenging for many diners.

Fura addresses these barriers through strategic integration:

The Quail Parfait Dish: By presenting the cultured quail as a torched parfait on hazelnut biscuit with dill cream and malt apple gel, Fura transforms laboratory-grown protein into recognizable fine dining. The buttery, smooth texture is emphasized—this is luxury food, not science fiction.

The Fat Byproduct Innovation: Perhaps more interesting is Fura’s use of the fat byproduct from quail cell cultivation as a “butter” for their Bread & Butter(ish) dish. Presented as a candle topped with pink peppercorn, garlic, and Maldon salt that melts into a dip, this showcases whole-system thinking. In traditional animal agriculture, fat is a byproduct too; Fura normalizes this for cellular agriculture.

The Quail Martini: Infusing cultured quail into gin and dry vermouth for a martini is audacious. It declares that cultivated meat isn’t a meat substitute—it’s a legitimate ingredient that can flavor spirits just as bacon or duck can. This is assimilation, not segregation.

The implications extend beyond one bar’s menu. Singapore approved Vow’s quail in 2024, making it one of the few jurisdictions globally where cultivated meat can be commercially sold. Fura’s adoption provides real-world data on consumer acceptance, preparation techniques, and culinary applications—knowledge that will prove invaluable as the industry scales.

Bean-Free Coffee: Fermentation’s Expanding Frontier

Prefer’s bean-free coffee, made by fermenting waste bread, soy milk pulp, and spent brewer’s grain, represents a different technological paradigm: precision fermentation and upcycling combined.

Coffee faces existential climate threats. Rising temperatures are shrinking the viable growing zones for Arabica beans, while extreme weather events devastate harvests. By 2050, suitable coffee-growing land could decline by 50%. Bean-free coffee alternatives aren’t novelties—they’re insurance policies.

What makes Fura’s implementation notable is normalcy. The Prefer coffee appears in a “New Age Sando” with apricot kernel ice cream and in a reimagined Dirty Banana cocktail. These aren’t dishes that announce their innovation—they’re simply good food that happens to use climate-resilient ingredients.

This understated approach may be more effective than flashy declarations. When diners enjoy a dessert and later learn it contained fermented-waste coffee, it challenges preconceptions about what waste can become and what delicious food requires.

Gas Protein: The Most Alien Ingredient

The first menu volume featured Solein, Solar Foods’ gas protein made by feeding microbes carbon dioxide, water, and electricity. This represents perhaps the most paradigm-shifting ingredient in Fura’s arsenal.

Traditional agriculture is fundamentally solar energy conversion: plants photosynthesize, we eat plants or animals that ate plants. Gas protein shortcuts this process, using renewable electricity to power bacteria that transform CO2 into protein. It’s agriculture without agriculture—no land, minimal water, no photosynthesis required.

The implications for climate adaptation are staggering. In a world of expanding deserts and flooded croplands, in regions with abundant renewable energy but little arable land, gas protein could provide nutrition independent of traditional constraints.

Yet it’s also the hardest sell. Cultured meat is still meat; bean-free coffee still tastes like coffee. Gas protein is truly alien. Fura’s decision to incorporate it into a chimichurri—a familiar, flavorful sauce—shows strategic thinking about how to introduce the radically new through the comfortingly known.

The 3 Crop Corn Cocktail: Regenerative Agriculture Made Drinkable

Not all of Fura’s innovations involve high-tech solutions. The 3 Crop Corn cocktail promotes crop diversification—rotating small grains, summer legumes, and cover crops—as a strategy for lowering emissions and supporting regenerative landscapes.

This highlights an important nuance in Fura’s philosophy: the future of food isn’t exclusively technological. It includes rediscovering agricultural practices that build soil health, sequester carbon, and create resilient ecosystems. The cocktail, featuring sorghum grain from Empirical Soka, corn silk vermouth, and mustard frills from local GreenLoop Farms, makes regenerative agriculture visceral and delicious.

The Waste-to-Worth Ecosystem

Fura’s sustainability extends beyond novel ingredients to comprehensive waste reduction:

In-House Fermentation: Three different kombuchas are made from ingredients that would otherwise be discarded. The milk kombucha specifically repurposes excess whey from a previous cocktail—waste from one process becomes the foundation for another.

Ugly Delicious Section: “Wonky” fruits and vegetables that fail retail aesthetic standards are fermented into fruit wines and kombucha. This addresses one of food waste’s most absurd causes: cosmetic imperfection.

Operational Details: Avoiding cling film, using reusable piping bags, and creating paper mâché from used receipts signal that sustainability isn’t just menu-deep—it’s embedded in operations.

These practices earned Fura the Sustainable Bar Award from Asia’s 50 Best Bars in 2024, but more importantly, they demonstrate closed-loop thinking. In nature, waste doesn’t exist—it’s always food for another process. Fura applies this principle systematically.

The Psychology of Future Food Adoption

Making the Strange Familiar

Rasmussen articulates Fura’s pedagogical strategy explicitly: “By connecting them to something familiar, our guests will recognize and feel comfortable ordering.” This is sophisticated behavioral design.

The quail becomes a martini. The bean-free coffee becomes a Dirty Banana. The gas protein becomes chimichurri. Each innovation is anchored to culinary tradition, creating psychological safe spaces for experimentation.

This approach addresses a fundamental challenge in food innovation: humans are simultaneously neophobic (fearful of new foods) and neophilic (excited by novelty). Fura navigates this paradox by wrapping the genuinely new in the reassuringly familiar.

From Intimidation to Approach

“We understand it can be intimidating for people to live in a way that helps work towards a more sustainable future, so we want to make that more approachable by showing people small steps they can take through food and drink,” Rasmussen explains.

This framing rejects sustainability-as-sacrifice narratives. Fura doesn’t ask diners to give up pleasure for principles. Instead, it demonstrates that climate-conscious eating can be indulgent, creative, and delicious. The cultured quail isn’t a sad substitute for “real” meat—it’s a luxury ingredient prepared by skilled chefs.

This positive framing may prove crucial for scaling sustainable food adoption. Research consistently shows that messages emphasizing gain outperform those emphasizing loss. Fura embodies gain: novel experiences, cutting-edge cuisine, being part of something forward-looking.

The Singapore Context: Why This City, Why Now

Regulatory Pioneering

Singapore’s role as cultivated meat’s first commercial market isn’t coincidental—it’s strategic. The city-state imports 90% of its food, making it acutely vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and climate impacts on global agriculture. This vulnerability drives innovation.

Singapore’s regulatory approach has been progressive: rapid approval processes for novel foods, government investment in food tech infrastructure like the Protein Innovation Centre, and explicit goals to produce 30% of nutritional needs locally by 2030. Fura benefits from and contributes to this ecosystem.

Cultural Openness

Singapore’s multicultural food culture creates unusual openness to culinary experimentation. When your daily reality includes Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Western cuisines, adding cultivated meat or fermented-waste coffee seems less radical. The city’s dining scene rewards innovation and novelty.

Moreover, Singapore’s wealth allows for the experimentation required in food tech’s early stages. Cultivated meat remains expensive; bean-free coffee costs more than conventional alternatives. A prosperous city with adventurous diners provides the ideal testbed.

Critical Analysis: What Fura Gets Right and Questions It Raises

Strengths of the Model

Practical Education: Fura provides something no amount of TED talks or scientific papers can: direct sensory experience with future foods. Tasting cultivated quail demystifies it far more effectively than reading about it.

Aesthetic Excellence: By maintaining high culinary standards, Fura proves that sustainable innovation doesn’t require compromising quality. This is crucial—if future food is positioned as virtuous but inferior, adoption will fail.

Systems Thinking: The integration of waste streams, local sourcing, and diverse technological approaches (cellular agriculture, fermentation, regenerative farming) demonstrates sophisticated understanding of food systems complexity.

Narrative Power: The “Journal of Future Food” framing gives coherence and purpose to what could otherwise seem like gimmicky novelty. It positions diners as participants in an important story.

Limitations and Concerns

Accessibility: Fura is an upscale cocktail bar. The future foods it showcases remain expensive and accessible primarily to affluent diners. Can this model scale to mass market affordability?

Technology Dependence: Many of Fura’s innovations rely on high-tech solutions (cellular agriculture, precision fermentation) that themselves require significant energy and infrastructure. Are we solving climate problems or just shifting them?

Cultural Specificity: What works in cosmopolitan, wealthy Singapore may not translate to other contexts. How does this model adapt for communities with different resources, values, and food cultures?

The Naturalistic Fallacy in Reverse: While Fura rightly challenges the idea that “natural” equals “good,” there’s risk in completely disconnecting food from ecological and cultural contexts that have sustained humanity for millennia. Is all innovation progress?

The Broader Implications: What Fura Signals About Food’s Future

Decoupling Food from Land

Fura’s menu embodies a fundamental shift: agriculture without agriculture. Cultured meat, gas protein, and precision fermentation all produce food with minimal or no land requirements. This addresses agriculture’s massive environmental footprint—it currently uses 40% of Earth’s ice-free land and drives 80% of deforestation.

But this decoupling raises profound questions. If food production moves into bioreactors and fermentation tanks, what happens to farming communities, rural landscapes, and food cultures rooted in specific places? What do we gain and lose in this transformation?

The Industrialization of Biology

Cellular agriculture and precision fermentation represent biology becoming programmable—we’re no longer selecting which plants and animals to domesticate, but engineering microbes and cells to produce specific molecules. This is agriculture’s biotechnology revolution.

This power brings tremendous opportunity: designing nutrition precisely, eliminating foodborne pathogens, creating products impossible through conventional methods. It also concentrates food production in the hands of whoever controls the technology—a concern when food security is at stake.

Climate Adaptation Versus Mitigation

Fura’s approach is primarily adaptive: preparing for the food system climate change will necessitate. But adaptation and mitigation aren’t identical. Does normalizing cultivated meat and gas protein reduce pressure for deeper systemic changes in consumption patterns, industrial agriculture, and economic systems driving climate change?

Perhaps both are necessary. We need systemic transformation and technological innovation. Fura shouldn’t bear the burden of solving everything, but these tensions merit consideration.

The Road Ahead: Scaling the Future Food Vision

From Premium to Mainstream

For Fura’s vision to truly reshape food systems, the innovations it showcases must become affordable and widely available. This requires:

Technological Maturation: Cultivated meat and gas protein costs must decrease by orders of magnitude. This will require massive investment, process optimization, and infrastructure development.

Regulatory Expansion: More jurisdictions must approve novel foods. The current regulatory patchwork limits market development and increases costs.

Cultural Normalization: What Fura does at small scale—making strange foods familiar—must happen globally through media, education, and repeated exposure.

Integration with Traditional Systems

The future of food likely isn’t complete replacement of conventional agriculture but integration of multiple approaches. Regenerative farming, cultivated meat, precision fermentation, traditional crops, and foraged ingredients may all coexist.

Fura’s menu actually suggests this—it features both high-tech cellular agriculture and low-tech regenerative farming. This pluralistic approach recognizes that different contexts may require different solutions.

The Role of Experiential Learning

Fura demonstrates the power of experiential education. Reading about cultivated meat creates one impression; tasting a delicious quail martini creates another. As food technology advances, spaces where people can safely experiment with future foods will prove essential.

This suggests a model for scaling: more establishments like Fura, adapted to different contexts and price points. Food trucks serving cultivated meat tacos. Fast-casual restaurants using precision fermentation proteins. Each normalizing innovation in their domain.

Conclusion: The Bar as Time Machine

Fura operates as a culinary time machine, giving diners a taste of meals they might eat in 2040, 2050, or beyond. This isn’t science fiction—every ingredient on the menu is real, produced today, reflecting technologies and approaches actively developing.

The genius of Fura’s approach lies in refusing to make future food feel futuristic. There are no sterile laboratory aesthetics, no sci-fi gimmicks. Instead, there’s thoughtful cooking, skilled mixology, and delicious food that happens to preview tomorrow’s ingredients.

Whether this specific vision of future food materializes remains uncertain. Climate change’s trajectory, technological development, cultural evolution, and countless other factors will shape what humanity actually eats in coming decades. But by making one version of that future tangible and delicious today, Fura expands what seems possible.

In a world facing unprecedented environmental challenges, imagination may be as important as innovation. Fura helps people imagine—and taste—that a different food future is possible. Not a dystopian future of synthetic nutrients and sacrifice, but one where creativity, sustainability, and pleasure coexist.

As Christina Rasmussen notes, the goal is showing “people small steps they can take through food and drink.” Each bite of cultured quail, each sip of bean-free coffee, is a small step. Multiply those steps across millions of diners, thousands of restaurants, and dozens of cities, and perhaps we glimpse a pathway through the climate challenges ahead.

The future of food won’t be determined in laboratories alone, or policy chambers, or agricultural fields. It will be decided in moments of choice—what we order, what we enjoy, what we’re willing to embrace. Fura recognizes that these decisions are made not through data and arguments, but through experience and pleasure.

In serving the future on a plate, Fura isn’t predicting what must happen—it’s creating space for what could happen, one delicious dish at a time.

• Limited Information: Most establishments appear to be dine-in focused
• Takeaway Available: Several hawker stalls and coffee shops
• No Delivery Mentioned: For most locations

Tourist Accessibility:

• Highest Value: Maxwell Food Centre, Tong Ah Eating House, Original Katong Laksa, Atlas Bar
• Moderate Accessibility: Most hawker centres and established restaurants
• Advance Planning Required: The Ampang Kitchen, Burnt Ends reservations

Cultural Significance:

• Historical: Tong Ah (1939), Singapore Zam Zam (1908), Song Fa (1969)
• Heritage Preservation : Kim Choo Kueh Chang, Tan’s Tu Tu Coconut Cake
• Modern Innovation: Burnt Ends, Cloudstreet, % Arabica

Cooking Techniques Highlighted:

Maxthon

In an age where the digital world is in constant flux and our interactions online are ever-evolving, the importance of prioritizing individuals as they navigate the expansive internet cannot be overstated. The myriad of elements that shape our online experiences calls for a thoughtful approach to selecting web browsers—one that places a premium on security and user privacy. Amidst the multitude of browsers vying for users’ loyalty, Maxthon emerges as a standout choice, providing a trustworthy solution to these pressing concerns, all without any cost to the user.

Maxthon, with its advanced features, boasts a comprehensive suite of built-in tools designed to enhance your online privacy. Among these tools are a highly effective ad blocker and a range of anti-tracking mechanisms, each meticulously crafted to fortify your digital sanctuary. This browser has carved out a niche for itself, particularly with its seamless compatibility with Windows 11, further solidifying its reputation in an increasingly competitive market.

In a crowded landscape of web browsers, Maxthon has forged a distinct identity through its unwavering dedication to offering a secure and private browsing experience. Fully aware of the myriad threats lurking in the vast expanse of cyberspace, Maxthon works tirelessly to safeguard your personal information. Utilizing state-of-the-art encryption technology, it ensures that your sensitive data remains protected and confidential throughout your online adventures.

What truly sets Maxthon apart is its commitment to enhancing user privacy during every moment spent online. Each feature of this browser has been meticulously designed with the user’s privacy in mind. Its powerful ad-blocking capabilities work diligently to eliminate unwanted advertisements, while its comprehensive anti-tracking measures effectively reduce the presence of invasive scripts that could disrupt your browsing enjoyment. As a result, users can traverse the web with newfound confidence and safety.

Moreover, Maxthon’s incognito mode provides an extra layer of security, granting users enhanced anonymity while engaging in their online pursuits. This specialized mode not only conceals your browsing habits but also ensures that your digital footprint remains minimal, allowing for an unobtrusive and liberating internet experience. With Maxthon as your ally in the digital realm, you can explore the vastness of the internet with peace of mind, knowing that your privacy is being prioritized every step of the way.