Is it a cafe? A bar? The beauty of the all day venue

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Back when I was late night bartending, I had a real gripe with my local café – their closing time was officially 4pm, but given my nocturnal schedule it would often be around 3:45pm before I emerged to seek my caffeine fix. The chairs would already be on the tables and the coffee machine “off” (i.e. they’d cleaned it and didn’t want to dirty it again), leaving me facing the depressing choice of a 7/11 coffee or no energising bean juice at all.

There are many positives to a bartenders’ schedule. It's never tricky to get a haircut or doctor’s appointment on a Tuesday afternoon, and you don’t have to fight for equipment at the gym when you go before 5pm or post midnight. I genuinely don’t understand how normies pick up a parcel from the post office or arrange a rental inspection. 

But, we do have to grapple with being out of sync with society, and that 3 to 5pm witching hour where cafés are closing up and restaurants and bars haven’t opened yet is always a tricky one. There are a few stalwarts: Mario’s on Brunswick Street is open 8am til 10pm every day, so whether you want a bowl of pasta at 11am or a latté at 7pm, they have you covered. City Wine Shop is open 7 days a week from midday, so it was an obvious choice when the Goodwater crew wanted to drink some fancy wine on a Monday afternoon pre-Boothby awards, when most other venues are taking a well deserved rest (and most other people are not drinking Chablis).

These venues have become institutions because of their reliability; they are true all day venues, with the same offering from open to close – you know what you’re going to get. There is another option, though, for venues looking to maximise their trading hours, and that is the day-to-night pivot. 

Sunhands opened in Carlton, around the corner from me, in 2023. All week they are a café, slinging flat whites, dippy eggs and deli sandwiches. Thursday through Sunday though, they extend into the evening and switch to wine bar vibes to make the most of what they call “the ceremonial Carlton aperitivo hour”. The menu changes entirely, to small plates like crab toast (which turned out to be essentially devilled crab, a delicious and fun twist I wasn’t expecting), and an addictive broccoli and stilton dip with spring crudites. 

This is washed down by a short but well done cocktail menu (I had the Never Never Mini Vesper Martini that came with a paired oyster – always choose the drink that comes with a snack) and minimal intervention wines, which are navigated by a discussion with the bartender on what they have open that night as opposed to a list. The light in the venue is beautiful, the staff are lovely, and the vibes are chill. It’s exactly the kind of place you want in your neighbourhood, with the offering evolving through the day to match your wants.

Good Measure on Lygon Street is another awesome example of this, highly regarded both as a café and as a bar in its own right. According to co-owner Max Allison, they chose to do day into night as a way to both maximise their offering and capitalise on the different skill sets of the owners (Max has a bar background, while Mitchell Miller has more café experience and Brandon Jo straddles both). While they initially kept the two identities quite separate, they have since merged them, “to make sure we were providing the most of what we offer for the maximum amount of time.” 

This means that alongside Max’s well-crafted cocktail list, you can also get their viral Mont Blanc coffee (and others) into the evening. Great for those of us on different caffeine schedules to the rest of the world, but also inclusive for non-drinkers. “We often see a group of four get three cocktails and one Mont Blanc, which to us validates the choice to offer coffee in the evening,” says Max. “There was definitely a subset of guests who were not coming before because one member could not get what they wanted.”

Max does admit that this approach can risk one side of the business overshadowing the other. “We are definitely more known as a cafe than a bar, despite a great drinks program,” he says, which is a shame because the drinks are on point. The Cumquat Negroni is zesty, juicy and lightly bitter, and the Summer Cup is a perfect balance of fruity refreshment. But, on a recent Thursday night the place is humming and the crowd is more diverse than a lot of other cocktail bars, perhaps because of the approachability of the café-bar format.

At the end of the day, Melbournians love their coffee and love their cocktails. Any venue that does both well is always going to win us over.

Around the Bars

• Bar Bellamy are back with a killer break-even on every Monday in November — Wagyu and Whisky! $30 for a porterhouse with bearnaise sauce and $18 for a dram of Ichiro’s Malt Chichibu Australian Edition 2024; it sounds like a pretty good way to celebrate having Mondays off to me.
• I’ve been waiting for something like this from Bar Spontana: they’ve teamed up with wild-ferment fanatics La Siréne brewing for a collaboration, using leftover mandarins from their cocktail programme. The launch is Thursday 21st November, and they’re having a magnum party to celebrate.
• If anyone else, like me, is mildly obsessed with sake, there’s a Sake Symposium happening for trade next week. Soichiro Tsuji, president of Gozenshu Brewery, and Quentin Hanley, director of Melbourne Sake, alongside Sake Samurai Simone Maynard from Melbourne will be discussing the fundamentals of sake and “traditional methods for modern brewing”. Register here.