Melbourne’s Bar Scene – the Awful Summer Truth

The stench from sweat mixed with perfume is palpable during the summer months, when God has gone on an extended vacation and left gullible humans to entertain themselves in Melbourne. The cocktails are overpriced to levels of lunacy. The beer is obscenely expensive. (Pint prices are more than London.) The service is poor at regular intervals. Happy hour is simply that – an hour where one can get a moderate reduction on prices, and only a few drink types at that. Many a pub or bar in Melbourne (notably the dinky, exquisite ones saluted by such guides as Bar Secrets), will practice this. Go to the old ‘working man’s’ pubs on Gertrude Street, and one is greeted by a list of beers and wine that will require a second mortgage. Ordinary beers (and yes, Stella Artois and the water-cum-tasteless Corona are ordinary beers) will sell at astonishing prices. This is less Bollinger Bolshevism than Kirin socialism.

A few myths require being dispelled in the world of Melbournian gastronomy. Don’t drink red wine during hot months, if you can help it. It is too hot (the wine that is). For some reason, ‘down under’ they don’t understand that room temperature has a historical significance, marked by an era where there was no central heating, and where servants scurried back and forth between a kitchen so distant from the dining room it chilled everything on route. Don’t interpret the words ‘serve at room temperature’ literally. You end up getting something devoid of taste and so viciously hot it will scald the throat. Go for the overly fruity Barossa Riesling instead, preferably chilled to Greenland temperatures to mask any distinguishing characteristics. At least the sweetness will distract you from the heat.

Service is often poor in the Melbournian bar universe. This is not a city which values the bar tender or waiter, a station of excellence in many countries. Bad service in such cities as Buenos Aires is tantamount to an act of apostasy deserving a ritual stoning in the kitchen. So, one goes to the Croft Institute expecting alcoholic beverages in a beaker. Famously, one is meant to have cocktails and other drinks in a miscellany of laboratory instruments. Trendy and seemingly fabulous, until you realise that you will get your under-developed, barely quaffable Pinot Noir in a whisky tumbler. ‘May I please have it in a beaker?’ is a request too awful to contemplate by a bar staff barely able to read their own advertisement blurb. One should blame the parents, or, at the very least, the bar owner.

Another issue is seating. There is never enough in this fine city of dining and wining. In some places, there is no seating to speak off. It is considered admirably pretentious to stand. One can linger and meander in bars resembling ware shops, if one is allowed to move. In the summer, this is particularly acute. Forget the air conditioning, as many places are so trendy they won’t install them, let alone use them.

There is also a fundamentally ageist approach to the bar scene. The young, nubile things who are idiotic enough to fork out $20 for an ineptly made cocktail will linger and crush each other by the dozen at Murmur. Unlike other parts of the world (take the gateway of gold, San Francisco), one finds an age group for a particular bar. There is, in this regard, one remarkable exception to this rule: Double Happiness. These chaps attract a range so eclectic they would make any cosmopolitan eager to join them in a night of relentless inebriation.

A final gripe. Don’t bother asking for a ‘flight’ of wines at Melbourne bars. They would sooner give you a full glass of a wine you don’t like before giving you a chance to sample five wines in small quantities at a specially arranged price. There is a fortune to be made there for the chap or girl in Melbourne willing to open a place where a range of wine tastings, rather than a taste cul-de-sac, is offered.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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