“Making drinks is fun, but it can be two-dimensional,” says Tash Conte, owner of Black Pearl. It’s not the weary comment you might expect from someone who’s run a world-class cocktail bar for 21 years. But it says a lot about what’s made the Brunswick Street bar so special. It’s about more than just the drinks, and always has been.

Black Pearl’s prestige has been long acknowledged. The Fitzroy institution has the awards (topped, perhaps, by being named Best International Cocktail Bar at the 2017 Spirited Awards), the legacy (with ex-staff opening influential bars) and, more than anything, that little bit of wonder drinkers are gifted when they visit.

Conte’s family originally ran a restaurant, Relish, on the site. If you look hard enough, you can still make out its faded lettering outside. Far from the glory of the years to come, those were tough days. One particular night spelled its end and opened the door for Black Pearl.

“One service I found a kitchen staffer doing something I didn’t approve of and have zero tolerance for," Conte says. “I walked him out, apologised to the few guests, refunded them, rang my father and said ‘Let’s just focus on what we know. Let’s do cocktails.’ We were selling more drinks than food any way, so it made sense.”

The build was a family affair. Conte’s father did the fit-out after his day job, while the rest of the family – mum Marianne, brother Ed and Conte herself – stayed until all hours, painting, making curtains, writing menus and so on.

The bar opened on August 2, 2002. Conte was married to a jeweller at the time and the family tabled the idea of naming it after a precious stone. Following a few weeks of deliberation – during which the bar operated with no name – the more distinctive Black Pearl beat out Ruby.

The first years weren’t easy, but as Conte and her family transitioned away from owning a restaurant to running a cocktail bar, Black Pearl slowly began to make a name for itself. Despite the reputation that would unfold, the team only started with RSL bartending experience and a book called 1001 Cocktails.

Conte: We opened on a Friday, no soft opening, and took in about $1500. We were doing cartwheels! Mum and dad lost a lot of their life savings with the restaurant, so we had our backs to the wall and nothing more than determination to make this second chance count.

In the early days, it was a matter of survival. There were days that were great and there were weeks where it was like, “oh my gosh, this is a lot more difficult than we thought”. But people persevered. Breaking into a street that has such heavily ingrained loyalty was really, really, hard but having me on the floor, my mum, my sister, my brother, people were like, “this is a family business – literally”. People loved that fact.

At the start all the drinks we were making were straight out of 1001 Cocktails. We still have the book to this day. One of our biggest sellers was the Watermelon Margarita. We were selling trays of them, with four blenders blitzing away at a time. It was crazy fun. That’s the very start – it was all the flavours from the RSLs – candy, sweet.

Harry Gill (long-time regular): [I started going] when it opened in 2002. I was going out a lot back then and so were a bunch of my friends. It was a fantastic time and Black Pearl turned up at a really good time. Since 2006 when I moved to Fitzroy, it’s a hundred metres from home. And regardless of how earthy or glamorous it might look, or feel, it’s always just been my living room – I use it as my living room.

Jacob Briars (Spirited Awards international chair, spirits educator): [In 2003] there was a whole flood of great bars opening in that Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, area – Ginger, Black Pearl – and it really felt like it was the centre of the bartending world, arguably in Australia at that point. On that short stretch in Brunswick Street you had a couple of bars that were doing things that were incredibly different and caught the attention in such a good way. It became part of my regular rotation of bars that I would visit on trips to Melbourne through the years.

From about 2007, Black Pearl began morphing into the bar we know today. The staff were humming, the awards were rolling in, upstairs counterpart The Attic opened in 2011, and one of the best bars in the world came down for a pop-up.

Conte: After a couple years I moved off the bar and took on the maître d’ role and the drinks focus. With new team members coming on board from abroad, we were able to push ourselves even further and encouraged everyone to contribute to the menu. We decided to elevate each team member and not only push cocktails designed by one person. That made our offerings more personal, reflecting us and our customers, and we outgrew 1001 Cocktails.

David Spanton (journalist, founder of Australian Bartender magazine): I’ll always remember seeing Tash and her bar team coming up to Sydney Bar Week around 2005, and finding out she would close the bar at great cost to herself just so all the team could be taken up to Sydney to enjoy the week of festivities. That, to me, was so humbling and a testament to Tash and how she puts people before profits and why she is loved by her staff.

Conte: The year 2007 was a big one for us. We’d been nominated for Bartender of the Year and Cocktail Bar of the Year at the Sydney Bar Awards. That's when things really shifted for us. We’d also been nominated for two Tales of the Cocktail awards, which were international.The recognition was mind-blowing. We were a small neighbourhood bar just doing what we loved. Over the years, there’s been a few awards, we never strove for the accolades but were lucky enough to be graced with them.

Fred Siggins (staff member 2012–2016, now drinks writer and educator): People like to say that awards aren’t everything, and it’s true, but it did mean a lot to me on a personal level because: a) it made me feel like a part of the global bartending community as opposed to just a local one; and b) it’s nice to be the best in the world at something.

Briars: I remember in the early days of The Attic when they did a pop-up with arguably the most famous bar on the planet at that point, PDT [Please Don’t Tell]. They created the whole experience of going to New York and going into the East Village and coming into this bar. I think it was probably one of the first times where Australian drinkers and bar-goers got a sense of, oh, “Black Pearl is on this kind of level. It can get the most famous bar in America to come and do a pop-up.”

Conte: We’d arranged for Please Don’t Tell to do a pop up in The Attic at the same time we closed Pearl for a refurb. The refurb ran over time. We boarded up Pearl so they could continue working and had to let the guests in through the alley way, through our kitchen, and up into the pop-up. The patrons loved it!

Knowledge has always been an important element of Black Pearl. There’s a Rolodex under the bar with every cocktail the team has ever come up with. But even with the best bartenders in the world, it’s tempered with fun and giving guests what they want – whether that’s an obscure classic or a bottled lager.

Briars: I think the defining thing about the Pearl is that you can go there and have one of those experiences with a drink that’s way outside your comfort zone with lots of care and attention from the bartender, and you can also have a well-made Daiquiri on a Friday if you’re just coming in and catching up with a few mates. The staff … don’t care which one you choose, as long as you have a good time.

Gill: I have a go-to drink, and it’s a rum and coke. And about 15 years ago [former staff member] Chris Hysted was saying “I’m naming new drinks. I’m going to call this one the Harry Gill-Tea because you’re guilty of drinking a lot of it.” They’ve got a bar tab with that on one of the buttons, which is nice. It’s pretty much for me, I think. It’s Appleton’s rum and coke. It’s nothing fancy but it makes it sound fancy and that’s part of the charm of it. It’s nice when people come along and say, “You’ve got a drink here named after you?” And I just say, “Look, I’m here a lot.”

Greg Sanderson (staff member 2008–2011, now managing director at Speakeasy Group): Chris Hysted was making a drink. It might have been for a cocktail competition. He was like, “I’m going to make a drink with all the ingredients that you swear about the next day.” You know how people wake up with a hangover and go, “Oh I fucking drank tequila last night.” Tequila’s in there. “Oh fucking hell I drank chartreuse last night.” Chartreuse is in there. The idea was all the shit that you swear about the next day, so tequila, jager, chartreuse, a whole egg. I think there’s vanilla syrup in there. It was fucking delicious. On all levels this drink should not work, and it was just so good.

That cocktail, the Death Flip, has become internationally known. Here’s the recipe if you’re interested.

Conte: One of our earliest cocktails was the Toblerone. It was literally diabetes in a glass. Imagine a V-line Martini glass with a swirl of house-made chocolate fudge, mum's hand made honeycomb chunks at the bottom of the glass, and chilled Toblerone with freshly grated milk chocolate on half the cocktail.

Siggins: One I came up with for a Bulleit competition I called Bulleit and Briar and it was basically a pre-bottled bourbon and blackberry soda. And it had its own little label on the bottle that was really cute, designed by a graphic designer mate of mine. [It] was one of those very first instances of having a cocktail that was pre-made. People loved it because it was a cool colour and it was pretty tasty.

Oisín Conneely (general manager 2018–present): I’ve never made more Martinis in any other bar than Pearl, so we always have a little Martini riff on there. The Martini at the moment is almost Vesper-style with some St Felix vodka, a little bit of Suze [gentian liqueur] and some Never Never gin with some vermouth in there as well.

A cocktail bar without great staff is more like a vending machine. Conte has always been uniquely concerned with her people, who are one reason Black Pearl remains so highly regarded.

Sanderson: I have a five-year-old daughter. I could probably train her to make a Margarita in 10 minutes, but people that really love hospitality, they love people. It’s about making a great drink but it’s so much more. It’s about the service, it’s about making people feel welcome, and that’s why Tash is really good. She does that herself, but she can also see it in other people.

Conte: I never hired any one that didn’t drink at the bar. The interview process wasn’t a CV, it was a couple of drinks at the bar. In a matter of time, I could tell if they were a person that would fit in the team over a 12 hour shift.

Spanton: Tash has always been able to attract and keep great staff and once she has them, she leaves them to be creative and to build great menus and service. I recall a famous bartender, Gary Reagan, once told me during a Sydney Bar Week festival many years ago that he doesn’t go to bars, he goes to bartenders. This is at the essence of what’s made Black Pearl so great and admired by the industry and media. It’s been ground zero for showcasing some of the best bartenders our country has ever seen.

Conneely: It’s always been one of the biggest focuses for us, that customer interaction and friendly welcome and atmosphere. The minute you walk through the door you feel like you’re in a comfortable space, a safe space. And the community that’s around is very important, from our regulars to the local hospo.

Siggins: I have a really clear memory of one of my first nights actually bartending. Back then, even for experienced bartenders, you basically had to be a glassy for a few months to learn the ropes before anyone let you touch a shaker tin. On one of my first nights behind the bar I was with (now Caretaker’s Cottage co-owner) Rob Libecans. It was Saturday night, really busy, and I was obviously pretty stressed out and had my head down, just trying to move as quickly as possible. Rob pulled me aside and said, “Hey man, look up. They’re here to see you. It’s not about the drinks, it’s about the show.” That was a really important moment in terms of remembering that as a bartender, your role is first and foremost to be a host.

Regardless of the era, one thing that defines Black Pearl is the dedication to fun. Pearl isn’t stuffy, no matter what the awards might suggest. From pranks and jokes to the infamous nude calendars, good times are mandatory.

Siggins: Nathan Beasley [current co-owner of Byrdi] and I were upstairs behind the bar in The Attic. It’s a slightly more buttoned-up style of service there, so we required everyone to be in a seat. And there was this one moment just before close. We were just about to turn the lights on and we were playing the Blues Brothers soundtrack, which is an album I used to like to play a lot up there. A couple got up out of their seats and started dancing in the middle of the room and, instead of telling them to stop, we just turned the music up. And for one single track, right before we turned the lights on and stopped serving, the entire room was up and dancing.

Sanderson: I was in the first [nude calendar] ... I remember on the day, I was walking into the photo shoot like “I’m going to see my friends’ nuts today and I’m not looking forward to it.” It was early in the day, it was like 11 o’clock in the morning and we were looking at each other like “Shot? Anyone want a shot?” It was fun. By the end we were running around and flicking towels at each other’s arses but it took a while to get into it.

Gill: I was quite pleased with [being included in the 2023 calendar] but I also reckon that was the reason it hasn’t come out this year. I’ve got a digital version but they probably don’t want to put it out because I’m in it.

“Credit must always go to Tash, the matriarch of the extended family,” Briars says. “Tash stays in the background, fiercely loyal, allows them to shine and that also gives you the sense of what it’s like to run a bar or create and develop a vision without butting heads with somebody with a big ego.”

Even beyond those former staff quoted above, the list of Pearl alumni and their achievements is huge – bars like Fancy Free and its World's 50 Bars ranking successor Caretaker’s Cottage; Sydney’s Bulletin Place and Dead Ringer – not to mention the global brand ambassadors, educators, group bar managers and drinks producers.

All this from just a single bar, with only an upstairs companion. Before Covid, there were plans to open a second venue but, for now, those are on the backburner. Whatever comes next, it’ll be up to the next wave of Black Pearl staff, and Conte will keep doing what she can to let them shine.

Black Pearl

304 Brunswick St, Fitzroy

0488 304 304

Hours

Wed to Mon 5pm–3am

blackpearlbar.com.au