First look: what to expect at Centro 86, the new bar from the team behind Cantina OK!, Bar Planet
First impressions from drinks across two nights at Centro 86.
You know the Mucho Group venues: it all began with tequila cantina Tio’s in 2012, and Oxford Street nightclub The Cliff Dive in 2013, before they opened the world-renowned Cantina OK! in 2019 and Martini joint Bar Planet in 2022.
They’ve just opened their latest bar, in the Sydney CBD, a couple of doors up from the new Swillhouse venue, The Caterpillar Club.
It’s called Centro 86. There’s a load of tequila, a grab bag of Margaritas, and a lot of attention to detail.
It’s down a little alleyway off Pitt Street, at the back of a Priceline chemist; once there, a sign for Centro 86 sits above an unadorned fire exit door marked, ‘Entrance.’ But as you take three flights of stairs down into the basement of the building, the aroma of popcorn grows stronger; walk through the narrow corridor to the bar, and you’re greeted enthusiastically — really enthusiastically — by two bartenders at the point of bar. Dressed in crisp white shirts and Kermit green waistcoats, each embroidered with the Centro 86 logo, the greeting gets your night started as they want it to go on — a little loud, friendly, and fun. It’s somewhere you might want to return a couple nights each week.
Which is exactly what I did this past weekend.
So what can you expect at Centro 86?
The decor is, well, a lot. Every wall of the bar is covered in framed advertising prints from a Spanish yesteryear... that never existed. This isn’t op-shop esoterica on the walls, these are 118 original pieces created by Mucho Group art director Clayton Ciolac across, what I’m told, was many late nights. They feel like they could have been made from the late 1800s through to the art deco period and on — exactly the kind of art a bar would collect over the course of a hundred years. There’s no doubles, it’s all original, and creates an immediate sense of familiarity in the bar, but a sense of something new, too, like you’ve wandered off on a trip to some place in Spain or Mexico and stepped back in time.
Those pieces include advertisements for products like Mano Mano, a mandarin liqueur which they use in their Centro Margarita; Rattlesnake, a spicy whisky liqueur; and a beer, Angel Oro. Those products all feature on the Centro 86 drinks list, and like the designs themselves, they were created and made in-house by the Centro 86 team. That is, aside for the Angel Oro, which is a white label beer from an undisclosed brewery — I would guess The Grifter — and which tastes exactly like the kind of beer I’d want to drink in Spain or Mexico (or Australia for that matter.)
