K.STAR (PLQ Mall)

K.STAR at PLQ Mall is a karaoke bar on the fifth floor of Paya Lebar Quarter, built around rooms themed on licensed characters.

The rooms bring recognisable characters to life — Disney, SpongeBob, comics and Pop Mart, under colourful neon — and each is decorated differently rather than to one house style. Guests can request a particular room when booking; Mario, SpongeBob and the Pop Mart room are the ones people ask for. It opens at midday and runs to 1am every day, with no weekend extension. Rooms are charged by the hour with cheaper packages before 6pm, thematic rooms running roughly $25 to $35 an hour and most groups spending $10 to $50 a head.

Two things are worth knowing before booking. Rooms run small for their stated capacity — six people will find one cosy and a group of eight will find a medium a squeeze — so book a size up if your group sits at the top of a range. The song catalogue is uneven, with some tracks filed under the wrong language. Against that, the sound system and the cleanliness are consistently good and the staff are what people remember, and the operator answers complaints rather than ignoring them.