With Jack’s Club and its Raising The Bar guest series, Astor Bar at The St. Regis KL is one of the city’s most considered nights out.

The first thing I notice in Astor Bar, past the warm amber light and the gilded details that feel lifted from another century, is the portrait. It is unmissable: a large monochrome photograph of Brigitte Bardot by Terry O’Neill, featuring her with a cigarette in hand, expression suspended somewhere between boredom and invitation. Tonight, it presides over a drum kit, a full band mid-set, and a room somewhere between KL, NYC and Jakarta.

Astor Bar, The St. Regis KL

Astor Bar occupies its corner of The St. Regis Kuala Lumpur with its high ceilings, generous proportions, and tasteful detailing. Warm lighting catches the gold accents at just, the dark walls absorb the noise of conversation, and Bardot watches from her wall as though she has always been here, and always will be.

The St. Regis connection to jazz runs deep. The Astor family, founders of the brand, cultivated an appreciation for the genre at their private social gatherings in the 1920s, helping to bring it into fashionable circles at a time when it was still considered revolutionary. The St. Regis New York went on to host the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

In essence, jazz at Astor Bar is a lineage, along with the iconic Bloody Mary cocktail. The St. Regis signature was born at the King Cole Bar in New York in 1934 and travels to every St. Regis hotel around the world, taking on a local twist. At Astor Bar, it is dressed as the Asam Boi Mary, drawn with calamansi and Sarawak black pepper.

On my table, a trio of nuts, crisps and olives introduced me to the bar’s hospitality. Astor Bar’s truffle fries arrive in a generous portion, fragrant and well-seasoned. The Korean fried chicken is similarly substantial, enough to feed two without dinner. Needless to say, your Thursday night out, from dinner to drinks, is sorted.

Jack’s Club at AStor Bar

Every Thursday, the bar hosts Astor’s Jazz Soirée with live performances in an intimate setting. On the last Thursday of each month, they take things up a notch.

Named for John “Jack” Jacob Astor IV, the brand’s founder, Jack’s Club arrives on the last Thursday of every month as an occasion in its own right. The room is reset: cocktail tables where there are usually none, a stage where there is usually a wall, and the menu changes entirely. Jack’s Club runs an exclusive signature cocktail programme inspired by the districts of New York City.

Doors open at 6:00 PM. Performances begin at 8:30 PM. Tonight’s set had Hazel Leong and her band serenading the room with tunes that never overpowered conversation.

Raising The Bar

While Jack’s Club is the reoccuring stage, Raising The Bar is what sometimes takes it.

Astor Bar’s guest bartender series brings international figures behind the counter for a single evening. Tonight’s edition featured Demitria “Demi” Dana Paramita, founder of Hats Bar in Jakarta. The name comes from the concept: like humans, the space wears two hats, a gelato counter at the front and a cocktail bar behind.

It also, not incidentally, describes Demi herself: a trained pastry chef and award-winning mixologist whose drinks think the way a dessert does, in temperature, texture, and the art of contrast.

She holds a culinary degree from Berjaya University College here in KL and spent several years at Anti:dote and Skai Bar in Singapore before founding Hats in late 2024. Her return was a well-received one. The number of working KL bartenders who turned up that evening was its own kind of endorsement.

Hats Jakarta x Astor Bar Menu

For her Raising the Bar shift, Demi brought over four creations from the Things Taken for Granted menu at Hats, which incorporates everyday ingredients that we overlook into cocktails that elevate and spotlight their potentials.

Then the Assam Laksa. Gin, pineapple, torch ginger flower, tamarind, cucumber noodle — served in a wooden bowl with chopsticks, the cucumber noodles draped over the ice, intended as the first bite before the first sip. It tasted true to Assam Laksa with the tamarind and torch ginger doing the work of the broth. Refreshing with a tinge of heat at the end.

The Ngopi is the drink that tells you most clearly who Demi is. Cognac VSOP, Kapal Api coffee, vanilla black olive gelato — served in a tall coupe, one half liquid, one half a pale scoop of gelato, the two meeting in the glass as you drink. Kapal Api is Indonesia’s most enduring coffee brand, founded in 1927 by a Chinese immigrant selling self-roasted coffee from a wooden yoke on the docks of Surabaya. It is the coffee of Indonesian households, of morning rituals.

The vanilla and black olive gelato, from Hats’ sister concept Brats, is fragrant and faintly savoury, dissolving into the warm coffee and cognac in a sequence that moves from contrast to cohesion: cold then warm, then a single creamy register that carries both. It is an affogato reimagined as a cocktail, or a cocktail reimagined as an affogato. The distinction stops mattering after the first sip.

The Hats Highball—blended Scotch whisky, wintermelon soda, Palo Cortado, cacao bitter, citrus—inspired by Air Mata Kucing, the whisky softened by the tea, and the sherry adding a dry, oxidative note that persists. The Asinan Bogor was similarly considered: vodka and Palo Cortado again, this time with Peychaud’s bitters and the sweet-sour punch of asinan anggur bogor, the Indonesian pickled grape that gives the drink both its name and its character.

Later that Evening

By the end of the evening, the two-hats pattern is hard to miss. Demi is a pastry chef and a bartender. HATS is a gelateria and a bar. Astor Bar runs a weekly soirée and a monthly club—the understated and the occasion, a few Thursdays apart. She was always going to feel at home here.

And Bardot, still exhaling from her wall, seems unsurprised by any of it.

Astor Bar
Level 2, The St. Regis Kuala Lumpur,
6, Jalan Stesen Sentral 2, KL Sentral,
50470 Kuala Lumpur (Maps)

Operation Hours:
5PM–12AM, daily

• Astor’s Jazz Soirée: Every Thursday, Doors 5.00PM | Performance 8:30 PM.
• Jack’s Club: Last Thursday of every month. Doors 6:00 PM | Performance 8:30 PM.
• Raising The Bar: Guest bartender series. Follow @astorbar.kl for announcements.

Reservations via SevenRooms or WhatsApp

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