Coming Soon: Bar Gabi, Navi’s Younger, Louder Sister in Yarraville

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Hot Listed Yarraville restaurant Navi isn’t the sort of place you can eat at once a week. Or probably even once a month.

Enter Bar Gabi, the degustation destination’s younger, louder sister. The two-storey, 60-seat restaurant and bar arrives next month on Anderson Street. And it’ll be powered entirely by various charcoals, including tea tree, mallee root and red gum, with no traditional ovens.

“We’ve got a hibachi at Navi and it works overtime,” says chef and co-owner Julian Hills. “We use it for stocks and stuff, where we hang fish above the smoke. There’s a lot you can add to food with a lick of smoke.”

Hills and wife Georgia Roberts have brought in additional partners for the project: Navi drinks manager Miriam Wahlhütter to run the bar, and her partner Paul Turner to lead the kitchen. He’ll plate up the likes of native-lemongrass chicken, saltbush beef tongue, kangaroo sausage with salted egg yolk and betel leaf, and grilled brie with pepperberry honey.

The cocktail program likewise incorporates smoke and Australian natives. The staff will mix wattleseed and macadamia Whisky Sours, a Tequila Sunrise with a smoked-paperbark twist and a dessert drink of rum, blood orange and rhubarb with blowtorched miso caramel foam. The venue name is a reference to both Wahlhütter’s grandma Gabi, and Gabija, a protective fire spirit from Lithuanian mythology.

“We’ve been thinking about doing this for a while,” Hills says. “My wife and I thought about where to do it and realised how much connection we have with the west, and how much we love it here. We’ve got some great places in Yarraville now. It’s a buzzing area, but this fills a little hole for something we don’t really have.”

Bar Gabi opens in late September at 21 Anderson St, Yarraville. Sign up to our free newsletter, Today, to get the full opening story, including original photography.