How Old Mate’s put together their latest cocktail list

This is your reminder to enter the #JustAddRHUBI Bartender Competition. This year RHUBI is partnering with Mix Haus, a platform to support and promote women in hospitality, to open the competition to female and non-binary bartenders around Australia, with four finalists being flown to Sydney and put up overnight, to compete in the national final and the top prize of $1,000 cash. For more information and to register now, hit the link here.

It’s strange to me think about a time in Sydney’s bar scene when Old Mate’s Place didn’t exist, because it’s the kind of place that feels like it has just always been there — it’s timeless, in a sense.

Old Mate’s Place opened on Clarence street in the Sydney CBD back in August of 2018. Occupying the fourth floor and rooftop of an otherwise unremarkable building, Old Mate’s quickly became a favourite with both the punters and hospitality types, and they’ve since opened up another bar — the rum-focused cocktail joint Old Love’s in the basement of the same building — as well as expanding to take over kitchen prep spaces on two more levels in the building.

They’ve always had good cocktails on the list at Old Mate’s — their Hidden Pina Colada and Pandan Airways cocktails landed on the Boothby Drink of the Year Top 50 last year — but their latest cocktail menu is something of a departure for the team.

“We’ve never really done a concept menu before,” says general manager Sarah Mycock in the interview below. The new list features 15 drinks, divided into distinct sections named for genres of books: adventure, romance, travel and the like.

Below, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, I talk to Sarah as well as Jay Cozma, the group’s training and development manager, to find out more about how the new list came together, the constraints that a high volume bar imposes on a menu, and why they haven’t batched every single ingredient for every drink just yet.

Sam Bygrave: Any drinks from the previous menu on there? Is the Pandan Airways still on there?

Sarah Mycock: Absolutely. That’ll be there until the day this place burns down.

SB: So what’s the process behind it? What’s the big idea behind the menu?

SM: We’ve never really done a concept menu before. It’s kind of been something that I’ve always kind of wanted to do, but it’s just, we didn’t really have the time to do it. Everything was a bit nuts. But we just decided to kind of lean into the thing that people, really like about the venue which is it’s like a library. So the menu, we’ve divided it into little different categories: you’ve got romance, adventure, horror, travel children’s fiction.

SB: The illustrations, where did they come from?

SM: Gabs [Walters] did them. Yeah, she’s amazing. And even with the outside of the menu, we wanted it to look like a book so it could be hiding on a shelf anywhere.

SB: How many drinks are on the list?

Jay Cozma: We’ve got 15.

SB: What’s on the list? What are we drinking?

SM: Still a couple of old ones like the Takes Two To Mango, the Hidden Pina Colada is still on there. Pandan Airways still on there. We’ve still got the Baker’s Dozen on there, but we did change it a little bit.

SB: How long did it take to pull this all together? Like when did you start the process?

SM: We started this a long time ago, in March. March was just figuring out the concept, figuring out what we want to do, figuring out if we even wanted to do such a big job that we had set ourselves to do. Then the first tasting was end of March. And then we had two weeks between those for the second tasting. And then getting these printed took a long time and having to go through and spell check everything, make sure that everything was consistent.

SB: My advice from now is just don’t read it ever again.

SM: I think I’m going to do that actually. We had to write all these little blurbs for all of the spirits, so that was fun to do that.

SB: Tell us about the paragraphs here and the little sort of spirit history thing.

SM: The blurbs here, if you read them, I’m sure hopefully everyone does,everyone got appointed a different spirits category to write about, so it’s nice to see everyone’s different tone of voice coming through. But again, we didn’t want it to be wanky. We didn’t want it to be like, we’re telling you exactly how this shit’s made.

SB: You don’t want to be boring.

SM: Exactly. So it’s still fun. It’s still lighthearted. There’s little jokes in there. But yeah, we didn’t want it to be like we know better than anybody else and we’re going to cram all this information down your throat.

SB: In terms of service, is everything pretty much batched these days? Or are you making things to order?

JC: It’s a good mix of both. We haven’t got anything that’s entirely batched out, so we’ve still got a bit of an element on the tools there.

SB: You guys get pretty busy though.

JC: Obviously we’ve got to keep a structure that works with the volume. Everything’s got some form of batch in it or prep syrup obviously, but it’s still a fair bit that goes into it.

SM: I think that everyone here would go a bit crazy if everything was just one pour.

SB: How did the process go for the drinks and the drinks getting on the menu? Is it a team affair?

SM: So we normally let people know when there’s about a month out that we’ve got to our first tasting for the new cocktail menu. We print out all the sheets, all the seasonal fruits, and everyone comes to the table with a minimum of two completed drinks.

And then from there we give them a bit of feedback, it’s an open a nice, big open conversation — it’s not just like us sitting there being like that’s shit. There’s never a drink that I think, that’s a fucking dead end. We always try and encourage — there’s no such thing as a bad idea.

SB: What else do we want to know?

SM: The lift is working. The lift is working.

SB: I wasn’t coming up here if it wasn’t — that’s a lot stairs. Back on the menu, is there anything you’ve got to do in terms of menu structure for service?

SM: Yeah, definitely not too many shaken drinks. Just a nice diverse range of methods, and glassware. It’s hard because every single person’s palate here is quite sweet, so we try really, really hard to not make the whole menu entirely sweet.

JC: Balancing out that menu, looking at what’s going to be a crowd-pleaser and big sellers, trying to make those the quickest and easiest high volume drinks to put out.

SB: That’s where you make your money.

JC: Yeah, we want to do that quickly. When we balance the menu, obviously looking at the good balance of up versus stirred down drinks, long drinks, sweet drinks. But then also, is this going to be a crowdpleaser that we know is going to fly out the door. How quickly and easily can we make the drink? You never want to be bunkered down with a drink that sells a million but it’s pain in the ass to make.

SB: And how do you manage the prep? What do you guys do? Do you have someone doing it on a particular day?

SM: We did try to lighten the prep a little bit with this one because we’ve had a couple menus that have been freaking very prep heavy and, my god, it just was a nightmare. So we tried to make this one a little bit easier. We do have prep days Monday and Tuesdays and that’s just shared between mostly all of the full -time stuff, people who get their head around that sort of thing. Eventually we would like every employee to be able to do a prep day.

SB: Some people have that brain and they get it, some people don’t and that’s fine.

JC: Obviously having two main kitchen areas between level three and level two, both have production kitchen areas in them. That really speeds up prep. When you’ve got a full space, a full area to be able to use with a lot of equipment, you’re able to get through the prep pretty quick.

This is your reminder to enter the #JustAddRHUBI Bartender Competition. This year RHUBI is partnering with Mix Haus, a platform to support and promote women in hospitality, to open the competition to female and non-binary bartenders around Australia, with four finalists being flown to Sydney and put up overnight, to compete in the national final and the top prize of $1,000 cash. For more information and to register now, hit the link here.