Der Raum – molecular cocktailing

On our last night in Melbourne, we were shown around a handful of the seemingly endless funky little bars that are scattered around the city by our delightful hostess Michelle.

Michelle is the creator of The Deck of Secrets, a series of playing card size packs designed to be a handy way for an out-of-towner to get to know certain parts  of a city.  The tour that we went on was the Bar Secrets tour of Melbourne, dropping in on some of the 52 bars that are included in the Bar Secrets Melbourne City pack.  The cards have a photo of the bar, the address, a short description of what makes it special, and a very handy map on the back of the card.

Even handier than the pack of cards, you can head over here to get the iPhone Application so you can have all the info you need on your iPhone.  Sweet!

As well as the Bar Secrets Melbourne, there’s also a Dining Secrets and a Shopping Secrets collection, and Michelle has taken the idea to other cities such as Sydney, Hong Kong and yes, Dublin!  We had a look through her Dublin Bar Secrets pack and were very impressed that she had some of our favourite tucked away pubs that are off the beaten track in there.

So on our last night in Melbourne, Michelle took us to 12 bars around the city.  Now, we didn’t actually have a drink in each of the bars so we weren’t completely legless by the end of the night!  But we did enjoy some rather special drinks along the way.

We started off in Der Raum, which is a little bit out of the city centre in a suburb called Richmond, about a ten minute cab ride, but a must-see if you’re in Melbourne.  It’s a cocktail bar with a molecular gastronomy twist – basically, you probably won’t find a Sex on the Beach here, at least not without being served on a tray in the form of a fake beach made of sand from St Kilda’s, if you know what I mean.

I had The Pharmacy which, as you can see in the video, was quite an experience.  Your drink comes on a medicinal metal tray, upon which are a little sherbert pill, a syringe full of aperol (kind of like Campari) and a medicine bottle with Roasted Capsicum and Pear Gin and Lemon Juice.  You pop the pill and the Aperol into the medicine bottle, give it a good shake, then sip the drink and finally eat the sherbert pill, which gives you a big burst of palette-cleansing flavour at the end of the experience.

I wasn’t sure how long I was supposed to shake it so I may have overdone it slightly, but it didn’t affect the taste of the drink anyway!

After The Pharmacy experience in Der Raum, we headed back to the city to enjoy some delicious Sake and Umeshu (plum wine) in the very cool Japanese bar Nihonshu at 164 Lonsdale Street.

After our Sake and Umeshu, we walked around the extremely cool Section 8 Container Bar, which is an outdoor shack down the tiny Tattersals Lane in the middle of the Business District that you would never find unless you were wise to it (or had Michelle with you as a guide!).  It was kind of like the smoking garden in The Bernard Shaw in Dublin, except a bit more OTT and missing the actual pub bit!  It was great.

We then found our way to Cookie, a really great bar where we had some delicious dinner of the Asian variety paired with some delicious Tasmanian Pinot Noir.  Cookie is in the large Curtain House on 252 Swanston Street which is also home to the very chic The Toff and the awesome Rooftop Bar, which boasts excellent views of the city centre.

I’m pretty sure we stopped by The Carlton next on 193 Bourke Street, which had the most delightfully bizarre interior, definitely not PETA friendly.  Check out the pic:

Lions and tigers and bears and erm giraffes, oh my!

We walked past The Canary Club at 6 Melbourne Place which was unfortunately closed as it was getting close to midnight on a Monday night.  We decided to squeeze in a  few more drop-in visits so we walked through the pretty much indoor smoking garden of Collins Quarter on 86A Collins Street and then made our way to the Melbourne Supper Club Bar.

Michelle explained that this was a bar that you could always depend on to be open, any night of the week.  The Supper Club is on the first floor of a beautiful stone building on 161 Spring Street, facing The Parliament building.  It’s like a 1940s cigar-smoking-gentleman’s club which beauitfully plush leather sofas and a lingering scent of cigar smoke.

We chose to head to the bar that is on the roof of the same building, called Siglo.  There we enjoyed another Tasmanian Pinot Noir, before heading back to our hotel and going to sleep for the last time in Melbourne…for awhile anyway.  We’ll be back as soon as we can!

Categories: Blog Trips Tags: Collins Quarter, Cookie, Deck of Secrets, Der Raum, Melbourne, Nihonshu, Rooftop Bar, Section 8 Container Bar, Siglo, The Canary Club, The Carlton, The Supper Club, The Toff