Drinking Melbourne is the weekly briefing from drinks writer Fred Siggins, unpacking what’s happening in Melbourne’s bars (and what you can learn from them), sent every Tuesday to your inbox. Get on the list here.
Welcome back to the Boothby Melbourne briefing, Sam Bygrave here again standing in for Fred Siggins who is lost somewhere in the vineyards of Europe.
In this newsletter:
- when the new, cocktail-focused Bar Privé opens;
- who its bar manager is;
- what to expect from the drinks;
This week I’m talking to Felix Woods, the group bars manager for Edition Hospitality, ahead of the opening of the group’s first standalone cocktail bar, Bar Privé. The bar opens on July 15th next to the group’s Reine & La Rue on Collins Street. They’ve appointed a bar manager from within, Dylan Field (ex-Reine & La Rue, Gimlet), and we hear on the grapevine that Bertie Boekemann, who Sydney readers may know as the former bar manager Now & Then and who is currently at Gimlet in Melbourne, will also be on the opening team.
Bar Privé will open five days a week, from 4pm to 1am, from Tuesday through to Saturday, and takes its name from the French word for private.
Speaking of Gimlet, by the way, they’re looking for a bar supervisor — you can look at the job description here.
Okay, let’s get into my chat with Felix on what we can expect from the drinks program at Bar Privé.
BOOTHBY: You seem to have a lot going on, huh?
FELIX WOODS: We’ve got a little bit, yeah. It’s all happening. Big year for us.
BOOTHBY: Bar Privé — what’s the big idea with this place?
FELIX WOODS: We’ve been looking to do this since Reine & La Rue opened, because Reine doesn’t have any private dining spaces. We’ve got the one big beautiful dining room and then we have La Rue, the bar, on the side, but no PDRs for private bookings. Then this site came up next door. Originally it was going to be three private dining rooms, but we needed to put a kitchen in and we needed to put a bar in — then we realised it’d be a little bit mad to not actually make it an actual bar for actual people to wander into off the street. So we cut it down into two PDRs and a cocktail bar. We’re looking at about 21 seats at the bar, but we’re hoping to squeeze some more in outside.
BOOTHBY: So there’ll be an outdoor area too?
FELIX WOODS: We hope so. We don’t know yet. We’ll know in the next couple of weeks.
BOOTHBY: It’s in the hands of the council gods, huh?
FELIX WOODS: Exactly.
BOOTHBY: And this is the first cocktail bar for the group?
FELIX WOODS: It really is. We’ve been building our bar programs within the restaurants over the last couple of years, but this is very much our first drinks-forward venture.
BOOTHBY: What’s the brief for the drinks?
FELIX WOODS: For Privé, it’s Reine but not Reine, is the phrase that’s been knocking around my head. We’re trying to make it its own thing, but trying to also keep it really connected to Reine & La Rue. Definitely sticking with French, but French in terms of ingredients, not in terms of the style of the drinks. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a French style of cocktail that you can point to anyway.
BOOTHBY: Maybe a Pousse Cafe or something like that.
FELIX WOODS: Oh look, it’s crossed my mind. It’s easy to use a lot of brandy, a lot of fortified, lots of absinthe and pastis but for the actual drinks themselves, we’re sticking to pretty classic structurally. I’m not the kind of bartender who obsesses over technique and process. I’m pretty straightforward and like simple, bold flavours, and drinks which really highlight the products you’re using.
BOOTHBY: Can you walk us through a drink that you’ve got in mind, or are you still locking that down?
FELIX WOODS: We’re still working on it all, but we’ve got a draft. I like to write the whole menu and then figure out if any of it works afterwards. I’ve got 16 drinks. Don’t know if they’re real yet. We’ll find out this afternoon.
Martinis are going to be a big one for us, a few different Martinis on at each time.
BOOTHBY: So the bar holds 21 people. You’re gonna have what, two bartenders, three bartenders working there?
FELIX WOODS: One behind the bar, and we’re thinking one floor, one house.
BOOTHBY: Will you be doing food at this bar as well?
FELIX WOODS: Yeah, we will. The building itself is split in half, with dining rooms on one side, and the bar on the other. The full kitchen will serve the dining rooms and then the bar will have its own menu with hot and cold snacks. All French leaning. We’ve got a beautiful New York-inspired French dip sandwich on there with wagyu which will hopefully be the crowdpleaser.
BOOTHBY: Love a French dip. Planning to open in July, was it?
FELIX WOODS: Yeah, July 15th. That’s the day. We’ve already got some bookings, so the licence better come through.
BOOTHBY: Time to get cracking. Are you looking for staff at the moment, or are you all staffed up?
FELIX WOODS: We’ve just taken on the bar manager. We looked externally and internally and ended up promoting someone from within Reine, a young guy called Dylan Field. He’s been with us for about a year, and then Gimlet before that. It’ll be interesting for him because he’s much more adventurous drinks-wise than I am. I think we’ll have a really nice to and fro working on the list together. He’ll be he’ll be pushing it, I’ll be pulling it back, and hopefully we’ll find some magic in between.
