The Everleigh’s Everlasting Pursuit of Excellence: 11 Years On, It’s Still the Perfect Cocktail Bar

“We see every seat in the bar as an opportunity to have a new and exciting experience. While you’re there, we want you to own it, and when you leave, we want you to remember it.”

Michael and Zara Madrusan wrote that introduction to the Everleigh in their 2016 drinker’s guide, A Spot at the Bar. And, as they celebrate the cocktail bar’s 10th birthday (a little belatedly) this year, the last request seems fulfilled.

The Gertrude Street stalwart is not only remembered, but celebrated and replicated.

There are memories of staff reciting historical cocktail recipes like poetry – or psychoanalysing a guest and matching them with a cocktail like some boozy Freud. Milestone birthdays in the Elk Room scored by boisterous jazz bands. First dates that became lifelong partnerships, spurred by little more than alcoholic alchemy and perfectly dim lighting. If you go to the Everleigh, you get those memories to keep.

The Everleigh opened on July 4, 2011, but its story starts nearly a decade before – in 2003. At that time, Michael was working in New York City and he became enamoured of a 24-seat speak-easy-style bar called Milk & Honey. It was young (opening in 1999), but already changing the cocktail world. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” he tells Broadsheet. “It was the first opportunity I had to be transported in time when entering a venue. From that moment on, I was [in] hook, line and sinker.”

What the Everleigh has become – and everything that’s followed from husband-and-wife team Michael and Zara’s Made in the Shade Group, which now includes Heartbreaker, Bar Margaux and Connie’s Italian Diner, plus Everleigh Bottling Co and Navy Strength Ice Co – starts with Milk & Honey owner, Sasha Petraske. Michael started working for him in 2005.

A Spot at the Bar opens with a tribute to Petraske, Michael’s mentor and major influence, who passed away in 2015. While you might not remember drinking cocktails in the early 2000s, a reminder – the fine art of mixology, the delightful service and the speak-easy atmosphere were yet to surge to the levels we see today. “Sasha was known for using fresh juice,” says Michael. “It’s [wild] that only 20 years ago, the concept of fresh citrus going into cocktails was considered a luxury.”

The importance of Milk & Honey can’t be understated, and Michael knows he owes Petraske for nudging him towards fate. “There were only a handful of these bars that would go on to change the drinking world,” Michael says. “To know that I was there at the beginning, and to see what it’s become, is special.”

Opening the Ev
Michael’s start at Milk & Honey founded a lineage that would lead to the Everleigh. With Petraske’s blessing to open a bar in Melbourne, Michael’s mother took out a mortgage on her home to help open the Gertrude Street space. The team remembers 2011 as a tough year, but it’s not a memory shared by those on the other side of the bar.

Michael: It came to a point about three years in. [Petraske] came to Milk & Honey one night and said, “I’ve got my funding organised for [Attaboy co-founder] Sam Ross for his venue. Now we just need to do you”. He said, “I think we should do something on the Upper West Side”. I said, “Sasha, what about Australia?” And he said, “I like it. Melbourne. Go.”

We opened the Everleigh with a very strict, stern, Milk & Honey-style approach to the service which, in Fitzroy, just wasn’t cutting it at the time. One of the great things we got to see pretty early on was that the service style wasn’t right for the area, and we got to change that pretty quick. Had we not, we wouldn’t be here today.

Alastair Walker (staffer 2011–2015): The first year was a hard grind in terms of getting people through the door, because we didn’t advertise or anything. It was just kind of wait and see, which was very trying for Michael considering he decided to do things on his own. His parents’ house was on the line. There was a lot of stress.

Pat Nourse (then Gourmet Traveller deputy editor, now Melbourne Food & Wine Festival creative director): One of the remarkable things about it is the way it felt entirely part of the fabric of the city the day the doors opened, like it had been there forever and was just waiting for us all to discover it. It’s like that dream you have where you find a new room in the house you’ve always lived in – only with better drinks.

Kym Ortenburg (Gertrude Street Projection Festival co-founder, long-time regular): We went in the very, very early days and it was a bar like no other in Fitzroy – and probably not in Melbourne. It had this really cool speak-easy vibe. It was very true to the 1920s. The music was ’20s music and they hand-wrote all the bills. There was no cash register. It was very pure. If it wasn’t in the 1920s, it wasn’t at the Everleigh.

Show-stealing service
Cocktails are only one part of the Everleigh’s success – it’s an all-encompassing experience. The hospitality is immaculate and personable, the atmosphere at once private and sociable. And when Zara arrived in 2013, the service was already hitting its stride.

Zara: I’d never seen hospitality be a dance … They were moving around each other incredibly well, there was this complete unity around what they were doing. I’d also worked in theatre, so I saw hospitality and theatre as being one thing that was all bound up together. I saw this space in the Everleigh and I was like, “Well, this is a better stage.”

Nourse: The thing about Zara and Michael and their team is they know that – a bit like Lance Armstrong’s whole “it’s not about the bike” thing – it’s not about the drinks. They have to be great, as good as they can possibly be, every time, but at a truly excellent bar like the Everleigh, great drinks aren’t the end of the conversation, they’re the beginning.

Walker: The person that’s serving you – you feel looked after by them. They’re genuinely interested in your choice of drink and engaged in your time. And that’s why not having a menu to talk through with people was fantastic, because you’re kind of forcing that conversation.

Classic cocktails done consummately
Attention to detail defines the Everleigh. Michael is as well-read as any cocktail authority, and he expects the same from his staff. “Bartender’s choice”, a trademark, is a dialogue between guests and staff to figure out what they’ll be drinking from history’s back catalogue.

Michael: I read a lot of cocktail books. I collect cocktail books. The training, in that regard, was very important. New staff would have to learn five drinks a night so that you would constantly build the repertoire, because of the “bartender’s choice” function. You really did want to have something new to offer somebody on their second or third or fourth trip.

Zara: There’s no room for trends and evolution, really. Essentially, it’s learning a body of 2000-plus classic drinks that have been set in stone, that Michael’s collated, and just getting better and better and more refined and efficient at creating those.

Walker: One thing that always stood out for us was the attention to detail – treating ice like an ingredient. If you’re not looking at these very small things, you can often produce an average drink or an over-diluted drink. The number of times we talk about dilution or temperature is just outrageous every day behind the scenes, but it’s super important.

Ortenburg: There’s a massive artwork that goes up over the Atherton towers [on Gertrude Street]. The projector for that one goes in the building next door to the Everleigh, but we use their three-phase power. I went up there in the very early days of the festival … and there was the sound of a chainsaw. I went in and one of the barmen was chainsawing this massive block of ice in the coolroom. I said, “What are you doing?” and he said, “We’re making our own ice.” I thought wow, that’s taking it to the next level.

Happy Everleigh after
Part of the Everleigh’s allure is in the relationships formed around it. First dates, marriages, lifelong friendships – cocktail bars are designed to be the backdrop to our most precious moments. The service that founded the Everleigh has, in a very real way, had a ripple effect on the lives of many who went through it. Michael and Zara married in 2017, and there are plenty of other relationships that blossomed thanks to the Ev.

Megan Everleigh (she and partner Ryan changed their last name to Everleigh; they had their first date there): I can’t imagine a better setting for a first date. The staff were making signature cocktails for everyone, so you have your beautiful table service and the charming staff who come over and say, “Tell me about the sort of thing you’d like to drink tonight and we can make you up a special cocktail,” which immediately gives you something you can talk about on a date that’s not just “How many siblings do you have?”

When we got engaged, I raised the issue of last names. One of us could change to the other person’s family name, or both of us could legally change our names. You don’t want to have to explain your name every time you meet someone but if they ask, you’d like there to be some sort of significance to it. We thought, “What about Everleigh?” – which is where we had our first date. We thought, “Yeah, that’ll work.”

Walker (married co-worker Heather Garland): We were just workmates, and then towards the end of the first year, Michael went away for four weeks to go back to New York. If you imagine everything that could go wrong, it went wrong. Things like the boiler breaking, people setting things on fire, freezers electrocuting people. It was a whole continuous nightmare. So Heather and I spent a lot of time together. I was warned beforehand not to get into it with the staff, so that was also another scary factor.

Ortenburg: Last year there were really bad storms in the Yarra Valley, so we didn’t have power for two weeks … We heard a van drive up our driveway and we thought, “That’s really weird – no one should be here, the town’s dead.” And there was the lovely Meg, who works for [the Madrusans]. She had come out on a mission. She said, “Michael and Zara have sent me – here is a care package.” They’d sent up ice and cocktails and charcuterie and cheese and a little candle. And Michael had written on the card: “We know you don’t have power, but you can’t live like animals.”

A transcendent legacy

Since branching off from the Milk & Honey family tree, the Everleigh has created its own. The Madrusans have birthed a stable of successful bars and brands. But there’s also a raft of bars from Everleigh alumni, taking the family ever onward. Andy Chu has opened One or Two in Melbourne, Bianca Wendt has Que Sera in Sawtell, NSW, and across the Tasman Alastair Walker and Heather Garland have Caretaker in Auckland.

As their old staff forge new paths, Michael and Zara are determined to keep moving forward. There’s some talk of a second Everleigh location outside of Victoria, while a potential rooftop extension to the Gertrude Street OG has also been mooted.

Whatever happens, though, the influential duo will take this anniversary to reflect, then continue their own pursuit of excellence. “One thing we talk about a lot – and are determined not to do as we hit these kinds of milestones – is resting on our laurels, being aware of what we’re good at and assuming that’s how it will always be,” says Zara. “This is motivation to do the things we do really well, even better.”

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