Hyatt Centric Kota Kinabalu’s rooftop bar ON23’s new signature menu turns the climb up Mount Kinabalu into eight cocktails based entirely on Sabah’s rice wine.

Mount Kinabalu sits on every mountaineer’s bucket list—ice axe and questionable knees included. I am certainly not one, but luckily for me there is another way up to the top, no permit or guide required, and the summit tastes better than it looks from the base camp.

At ON23 Sky Bar, the granite counter is solid enough to knock on. Behind it, spirits sit lit individually in carved stone niches like a wine cellar that grew up and moved to the roof. The view runs from Signal Hill to the South China Sea. Somewhere out there, actual climbers are hauling themselves up from the lowlands through gruelling, multi-day ascents, altitude sickness and blistered feet and all. The Borneo Collection compresses and romanticises that entire climb into an evening at a bar stool.

Building A City’s Taste

Ask most bar-goers in Kota Kinabalu what they want to drink and be answered with a gesture at the draft beer tap, ask the bartender what their guests like to drink, and they’ll likely tell you the same thing. Premium spirits arrive slowly through import routes, and the bartenders with real ambition tend to leave to hone their craft. Alvin Angkal, ON23’s lead mixologist, told me all of this during my two-night stay at Hyatt Centric Kota Kinabalu, of which I spent both nights in conversation with him about the bar and the craft.

READ ALSO: Hyatt Centric Kota Kinabalu Review: I Was There, So I Went Everywhere

Alvin is not, by his own admission, the most technically gifted bartender in Malaysia. What he has instead is much rarer: he is always learning, always adjusting, endlessly curious about what a spirit or an ingredient can do if pushed slightly further than the last person tried. Behind the jovial front-of-house energy is a family man who wants the rest of the world to see Sabah the way he does, which turns out to be a stronger foundation for a cocktail programme than technique alone.

The Borneo Collection is ON23’s answer. Spanning eight cocktails, each one a waypoint on the climb toward Kinabalu’s summit, carrying Sabah’s own rice wine somewhere in the build, either Lihing or its distilled cousin Montoku, double-fermented into something closer to a clean spirit than the honeyed, faintly funky wine it started life as. The menu’s structure follows the ascent, reaching higher than the summit even asks for.

I adore rice wines of this kind. Lihing and its Sarawakian cousin tuak share the same ancestral DNA, sweet, glutinous rice fermented into something warm and approachable in a way that hard spirits rarely manage. They carry real cultural weight too, tied to the indigenous tribes who have made them for generations, which means going all in on Lihing and Montoku the way Alvin has gives the Borneo Collection a unique sense-of-place story.

The Borneo Collection

Bimbizangan begins the ascent at its gentlest. The name translates to butterfly in Kadazan, borrowed from the 1,500 species that flutter around Kinabalu’s lower slopes. Lihing meets gin infused with butterfly pea flower, and the glass turns a deep, improbable purple before the tonic stretches it out into something bright and easy to keep drinking. It’s the on-ramp, and possibly the best-looking drink on the table.

Hillside follows, earned its place on the strength of its own flavour—Lihing folded into Midori, green apple, kiwi, mint, and passionfruit syrup, tasting like the lush green partway up the mountain before the spirit even has a chance to weigh in. Then Naga Kinabalu turns the volume up considerably, a fiery fuchsia of Lihing, Haku vodka, and dragon fruit, built around a story of a dragon guarding treasure at the summit and with it Sabah’s whole mythology.

Higher up, the menu starts sourcing flavour directly from the mountain’s own backyard. Borneo Sunrise pairs Montoku with Olmeca tequila, mulberry syrup from Kundasang’s tamu market, and bambangan (Borneo’s wild mango), here pressed into juice rather than pickled or blended into an aioli the way it turns up elsewhere in Sabahan cooking. When I tried this one at the bar, the bambangan’s tartness cuts straight through the tequila’s heat—a tequila sunrise that actually tastes like the highlands, not a poolside cliché wearing a Bornean costume.

Tenom is the closest thing on this menu to an espresso martini, my personal go-to and the drink I use to judge any bar’s competence. Here it’s rebuilt with Montoku, smoky Tenom coffee grown in Sabah’s interior, and lifted with Belvedere vodka and Kahlúa. Tenom coffee is brewed rather than extracted like an espresso, so the drink arrives without crema, lighter and smoother than the classic version I’m used to.

Try it exactly as Alvin built it first. If you’re anything like me and lean toward the heavier, espresso-forward style, remember that Cocktail With Your Name exists for exactly this reason, tell Alvin what you actually want, and he’ll build it in front of you.

The Low’s Peak arrives at the summit proper, Montoku softened with Vitagen cultured milk, coconut milk, pineapple juice, and Absolut vodka, smooth enough to taste like a reward rather than a fourth cocktail in a long evening. Obulou takes the sky above the peak as its muse—Lihing, gin, blue curaçao, and orange bitters under a rosemary-scented smoke bubble that pops open at the table, a stunning visual of the blue sky, white clouds with bright, citrusy undertones.

And we arrive in full circle to Haus Bah!!, double exclamation marks included, rounding out the collection not as its finale but as its origin story. This is the drink the whole indigenous-ingredient philosophy grew out of, Lihing, Havana 3-year rum, dried sour plum, calamansi, and Uinah’s craft ginger soda, a spirited reinterpretation of kitchai ping, the calamansi drink every Sabahan grew up on.

Haus means thirsty. Bah is the sentence particle Sabahans tack onto everything the way Peninsular Malaysians reach for lah. I had this a taste of it on my first evening in Kota Kinabalu and understood why it never left the menu even as everything around it changed.

Araimaiti, the tasting notes say, roughly translating to let’s celebrate. One glass will never be enough, and they are right. Haus Bah!! becomes the defining drink of ON23 for good reason.

Beyond the Summit

The eight-drink menu isn’t where Alvin stops. Running alongside it, is a secret menu of personal signatures for guests who want to keep climbing past the fixed points.

The Mystic Mango takes sous-vide bambangan, clarifies it milk-punch style with Havana rum and Lihing, and finishes with a whisper of mezcal smoke, the most technically demanding pour I had across two evenings at that bar. The Bold Like Grandma, named for the grandmotherly face on a bottle of Lihing dressed up in post-retro industrial branding, takes wild ginger and folds it into Malibu, Johnnie Walker Black Label, and Lihing until it reads as comfort rather than confrontation.

For guests who’d rather be surprised than choose, ON23 runs a Cocktail With Your Name On It programme: describe what you like, and the team builds something around it on the spot. They photograph you with an instant camera when the drink arrives, and the film is pinned to a growing board as a visual ledger of a bar figuring out what a guest has not decided what they want yet, one conversation at a time. Most people, Alvin told me, don’t actually know what they want to drink, and I’d wager it is every mixologist’s dream to flex their creativity in the name of hospitality.

Not Yet, But Close

Kota Kinabalu is not a mixology destination the way Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, or Singapore are, and the Borneo Collection does not pretend otherwise. What it does is make a case, glass by glass, that the city is catching up faster than its reputation suggests. Kota Kinabalu has spent too long being treated as Sabah’s gateway rather than its destination, but the hospitality scene here is turning aggressively competitive, with premium openings and grand old properties refurbishing themselves across the city and beyond it. That new wave of arrivals will go looking for exactly this kind of creative offering, and Alvin, if anything, has arrived slightly ahead of the market he’s building for.

The Borneo Collection is available starting July 2026, with a physical menu in tow to have something tangible in hand.

You probably won’t believe me if I told you to fly to Kota Kinabalu specifically for cocktails, so I won’t, not yet at least. But I will tell you, without qualification, that if you’re already here, ON23 is reason enough to stay past sunset. The view gets you to the bar, but The Borneo Collection is why you order a second round.

READ ALSO: Getting to Know Kota Kinabalu, Sabah: A First-Timer’s Guide

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