Their food menu includes charcuterie and cheeses as well as small share plates such as ‘of the moment fare’ meatballs and mac’n’cheese.Ĭocktails are a specialty with a range of signatures as well as the classics. The place is always packed and if you’re lucky you will score a seat. It’s all class here with a roaring 20’s theme and leather chesterfields to relax in. Head down the stairs and enter this underground 1920’s prohibition den. If you look closely, you will recognise the entrance where the bouncer is standing. is tucked down Abercrombie Lane (running between George and Pitt Streets). So, here I count down 9 of the best-hidden bars and restaurants in Sydney and give you a few tips on how to find them! 1. In fact, you may easily walk past one of these spots blissfully unaware of the fun that is happening inside. And the problem with these establishments is that they are well hidden. These hidden hotspots are usually unsigned with each one harder to find than the last. A new breed of bars and restaurants have been spawning all over town, hidden down laneways, behind non-descript doors, in basements and on rooftops. ![]() It's the thinking that lets us empathise with racing-industry types temporarily impoverished by horse flu but not with the legions of musos and creatives permanently crippled by antiquated liquor laws.A curious thing has been happening in Sydney over the past few years since the Australian government relaxed the liquor licensing laws. It's the same thinking that sent Lachlan Macquarie packing in 1821 for having the hide to build us decent public buildings - like the Rum Hospital that now houses Parliament itself. Is it, perhaps, just another outbreak of old-style Sydney rissole culture? The culture-phobia that ticks as true blue the ersatz, obesogenic screen culture of pokies and cocaine-fuelled football but resists and resents anything involving talk, engagement or creativity? Which poses the obvious question why, though, after so many Friedmanite decades, we supinely accept this particular monopoly? What does it say about Sydney that we have a deregulated airport, in a field where competition is impossible, so that we now pay $12 to park and $4 for a barely operable trolley, but we refuse to deregulate liquor, where the spin-off benefits for city life, physical fabric and urban culture would be immense? That is, a choice of small, casual neighbourhood bars and cafes in which to read, chat or ramble on all night over a beer, margarita or chardonnay without pokies in one ear and footie in the other. It takes a power cut for Sydneysiders to enjoy what people in other cities - from Paris or London to tin-pot Auckland - can have any day, any week. Tell that to the Royal North Shore.) No, the money motive is clear, however seductively clad as harm minimisation, noise control or fire safety. (Interestingly, when Premier Cahill legalised poker machines in 1956, the tax revenue was to go directly to public hospitals. It's not like they haven't had time to make changes. The Government, while professing equal determination to end said monopoly, does very nicely from it, via taxes, donations and pub-held fund-raisers. They're exceedingly happy - as in determined - to keep it that way. The AHA's liquor monopoly dates from pre-Askin days, and mindset. The reason, for both AHA eagerness and government chain-dragging, is clear. Here, you can see a section of the tributary system that supplied Sydney with water in the late 1700s and early 1800s. As councillor and protester John McInerney said: "This is not about drinking, it's about culture." As in, having one. Inside is a grand, light-filled atrium featuring a food court of classy restaurants and bars, and for a secret treasure, seek out the exhibition space for the original Tank Stream which is hidden in a nook on the lower level. ![]() Like, who's he anyway? It was also a pro-gesture for Clover Moore's Liquor Amendment (Small Bars and Restaurants) Bill and an appropriately civilised protest in favour of civilisation. ![]() A play on Australian Hotels Association president John Thorpe's insistence that "we don't want to sit in a hole and drink chardonnay and read a book. ![]() Forty or 50 people gathered in 33-degree midday sun to read identical books and sip identical glasses of chilled chardonnay. The performance art we do have we tend to miss, like last week's Raise the Bar protest outside Parliament House. We don't have that intensity of stimulus, and long may it be so. Falling Man - both the work and the novel - is a response to 9/11. We don't have a lot of performance art in Sydney, not beyond the silver body-paint fake-statue variety that is the performance equivalent of the hand-carved rose-scented soap koala. Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man, features a performance artist whose work is to drop silently and without warning from public platforms, bridges or buildings and then to hang, stiffly posed, from a leg-rope hidden inside his business suit.
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