First look: Lola Belle, the new champagne and Daiquiri bar from Huw Griffiths

Step Into The Never Never 2024 is here and you’d better hold onto your butts, the prize is better than ever.

You’ll need to create two drinks: a Gin & Tonic serve that embraces our great beaches and coastlines — surely, some of the world’s best — to ‘Toast the Coast’; and a flavour-first cocktail using only three ingredients, that makes the hairs stand up on the back of co-founder Sean Baxter’s head (his words, not mine).

This year’s winners will score a McLaren Vale trip like no other: luxury accommodation, helicopter rides, and dining in South Australia’s most celebrated restaurants.

You’ll want to hurry — drinks need to be on menus at the start of May. Email sean@neverneverdistilling.com.au to enter ASAP.

Look, if you’re opening a place that’s billed as a champagne and Daiquiri bar, you have my attention.

Lola Belle quietly opened last week, and is the next bar from Huw Griffiths, owner of Melbourne’s Union Electric bar, which landed on the Boothby Best Bars VIC Top 50 last year.

As for the those aforementioned Daiquiris? There will be three takes on the classic Cuban preparation on the list, as Huw talks about in the interview below: a light Daiquiri, with a trio of rums (an Australian agricole-style, a molasses based rum, and a dash of Wray & Nephew) and clay-aged sugar syrup — more on that below; the dark Daiquiri, which features dark rum and a molasses syrup; and the third, their take on the Hemingway Daiquiri, for which they’ve made acid-adjusted grapefruit juice.

There will be six champagnes by the glass to begin with, as they steadily build up their cellar — some French, some natty and Australian. And when it comes to food, Huw says they’re offering “minimal intervention food” in the form of deli meats (they’ve got their own slicer on hand), cheeses, and oysters shucked to order.

You can find Lola Belle at 233 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy and follow them on Instagram @lolabellebar.

Below, Huw talks through the idea behind the bar, how it’s rooted in the history of mid-1800s Melbourne, and the processes they’ve employed to make their Daiquiris something to talk about.

Sam Bygrave: Tell us about Lola Belle, Huw. It’s on Brunswick Street, isn’t it, in Fitzroy?

Huw Griffiths: Yeah, 233 Brunswick Street. It’s in a site that James Harden actually wrote about as one of the original Melbourne fine dining restaurants. It’s a building that was built for a wine merchant back in the late 1800s during the gold rush years.

Oh wow, that’s cool.

That’s where the story started for the bar.

Well, give us the pitch for the bar, what’s the idea behind it?

Well, we’re a champagne and Daiquiri bar.

All right, I’m booking a flight now.

I tried to explain it in a very detailed but long-winded way and just no one understood what the fuck I was talking about. Because I guess Australia is sort of built on rum. I like rum, which is great.

I also like the history of Melbourne, especially around the Gold Rush era and characters like John Monash, who’s really important to the Australian story but no one knows about.

That’s where the name Union Electric actually came from — John Monash was the general that won World War I, but he brought brown coal power to Melbourne, which at the time was the richest city in the world. So we had a public power system, and that’s where the Union Electric name came from.

Lola Belle refers back to that time as well. There was a character over here called Lola Montez. Sebastian Reaburn actually told me about her when I looked her up.

Of course he did.

She was a Californian dancer, what we call a burlesque dancer now. She was very popular with some people, very unpopular with others. They tried to say she was a fake and all these things. And we’re sort of playing into that idea that Lola Belle is a mysterious character.

We sort of dialled back in and distilled it down to the idea that it was a champagne and Daiquiri bar, paying tribute to the old as well as the new.

Melbourne during that era had something like 60 champagne and oyster bars. And so many oysters were consumed that we made the local native oyster extinct. But we also drank more champagne than all France.

Really?

Yeah. But everyone knows about the gold rush in California, because the Americans are really great at marketing themselves. But Melbourne produced more gold in a shorter period of time.

So we were drinking more champagne than France. Were we drinking more Daiquiris than Cuba?

I don’t know if Daiquiris was a thing, but we were definitely drinking a lot of rum. Because Australia’s always had this issue of rum all the way back to Macarthur and Macquarie. Obviously the Rum Corps was in control of most of the early days of the colony. The first hospital in Melbourne was built on an agreement to import rum into Australia.

I wanted to sort of make sure we were showcasing Australian rums and Australian sparklings, but next to the stuff that people are used to.

And tell us about the Daiquiri?

The Daiquiri we’re making at the moment isn’t just a Daiquiri, but we’re acid levels.

So the Hemingway Daiquiri is an awesome one that we love. And we’re using a proprietary method of acidifying the grapefruit juice to balance it, but also prevent it from oxidising very quickly. So when we make the actual Hemingway, it’s this beautifully balanced, well-rounded drink instead of having something that’s too sharp or too sweet or too alcoholic.

We’ve got a trio of Daiquiris on the menu. The light Daiquiri is made with Husk, a good light rum from South America, and a touch of Wray & Nephew.

Yeah.

And that’s just very simply made with fresh pressed lime juice, we juice to order, and some clay aged sugar syrup.

Clay aged, right? What does that do?

So you’re familiar with Plantation rum obviously, and you may or may not like that he puts sugar in it, but the sugar he puts in it is delicious because he doesn’t just mix sugar with water, he mixes sugar with cognac and makes a dosage and then he balances and ages that in cognac barrels.

Okay.

We’re letting the sugar rest with the spirit before we just pump it into a drink. It just rounds out and changes the profile.

Oh, okay, that’s interesting.

The dark Daiquiri, we’re using dark rum and molasses syrup. So you get this really lovely, rich, there’s actually quite a bit of funky acid in molasses, which comes to the forefront when you put it with a touch of lime.

And the third one is the Hemingway, which is obviously with the acidified grapefruit juice and that’s actually our bartender Jack’s creation. He’s done a really great job of that.

How many champagnes do you have on the list?

At the moment we are only doing ones by the glass before we flesh out the list, so we’ve got six.

By the glass, nice.

So we’re working with Campari, so we’ve got their Lallier Champagne, which is great. But then we’ve got this really cracking natural blanc de blanc and then we’ve got a really awesome, savoury lambrusco. They’re all sort of stepping up next to the old school Frenchies. But the plan will be to have a cellar list we build up over the next two to three months while we expand the back of house.

What’s the capacity of the bar?

It’s 80 inside and 60 outside on the corner. We’ve got a really nice outside corner.

Yeah, what are your trading hours?

Seven nights, pretty much every day except for Christmas day and staff party.

I love that.

So the bar opens from midday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And then 4pm every other night.

That’s good. Are you doing food?

We’re doing what we call minimal intervention food, so cheese and meats.

I haven’t heard that before — I like that.

We’re doing oysters as well, actually shucking ours fresh. That’s the most we’re doing with the food.

What made you land on the Daiquiris as opposed to any other type of rum based kind of cocktail?

Well, I love rum, but I mean, just as nothing seems to go as well with gin as a bit of citrus and some mint, rum’s best friend is lime and sugar. I think anytime you get a chance to just do that, that’s when it stands up. Yeah.

We’re just we’re taking products that are already awesome, and just letting them speak for themselves.

In terms of people, who’s running the bar?

Yeah, so, Lachlan Hunter came with me from Union Electric. He was at Bomba with Cara [Devine] just before he came to us. He’s a fully qualified chef who went into bartending. He just gets it. He’s not just a bartender, he gets every aspect of it. Lachy and I actually built the whole bar ourselves. We pulled the tools out.

Oh, wow.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this place without him. We decided this one we wanted to literally have hands on everything from the ground up. So we’ve done everything except the steel fabrication, the plumbing, the electrics and yeah, that’s pretty much it. He is running this venue, and Union Electric if I’m not around.

I picked up Jack Sandeman, he used to be at Black Pearl. He’s in charge of the drinks program. He came up with the recipes for the Daiquiris, working with me and Lachy. It was his idea to get molecular with the Hemingway. We couldn’t figure out how to get it consistent, so he did a really good job of that.

And then we got another guy who’s kind of the front man. He’s always got a smile on his face, his name’s Blair Hayes.

Step Into The Never Never 2024 is here and you’d better hold onto your butts, the prize is better than ever.

You’ll need to create two drinks: a Gin & Tonic serve that embraces our great beaches and coastlines — surely, some of the world’s best — to ‘Toast the Coast’; and a flavour-first cocktail using only three ingredients, that makes the hairs stand up on the back of co-founder Sean Baxter’s head (his words, not mine).

This year’s winners will score a McLaren Vale trip like no other: luxury accommodation, helicopter rides, and dining in South Australia’s most celebrated restaurants.

You’ll want to hurry — drinks need to be on menus at the start of May. Email sean@neverneverdistilling.com.au to enter ASAP.