The Bar's Native Cocktail Program

It started with a leftover

Three years ago the kitchen had a quandong glut and the bar had a shrub problem. We cooked the fruit down into a drinking vinegar, added it to a gin sour, and the result was better than anything on the existing list. That one glass is the reason the bar now runs a pantry program that shares suppliers with the kitchen rather than ordering from the usual syrups.

The signature six

The current list has six house cocktails built around native produce. The Red Earth Old Fashioned uses wattleseed-infused bourbon; the Quandong Sour uses the shrub; a rooftop-honey martini uses honey that travelled twenty storeys from hive to glass; and a saltbush gimlet uses the same leaf the lamb grazes on. Each one tastes like this state in a way no imported liqueur could.

What changes seasonally

Finger lime in spring, desert lime in winter, native thyme whenever the garden dictates. The bar runs on the same Sunday harvest list the kitchen gets — meaning the cocktail menu rewrites as often as the food menu. Guests who visited in summer and returned in autumn have had two completely different drinks programs without knowing it.

The masterclass connection

Everything in the program is taught in the Friday cocktail masterclass — the shrub recipe, the infusion timings, why wattleseed needs four days in bourbon not two. Guests leave with the spec sheet for all six signatures. The point is not secrecy; it is the opposite — the technique is simple enough to take home, and the results are good enough that people do.

Where it goes next

A zero-proof list built on native distillates launches next month — same botanicals, no alcohol. And the bar is trialling a house amaro using fourteen SA botanicals that may or may not survive the licensing review. Ask at the bar; the test batch lives in the top-left cabinet.