Joe Jones Has Been Running a Secret Bar – at Mecca

By now you likely already know Mecca’s new Bourke Street store (the Melbourne retailer’s 111th) is the largest beauty store in the world. There are more than 200 brands, 80 services and seven new concepts including a gifting mezzanine with engraving and calligraphy, as well as a skin clinic with cosmetic consultations with registered nurses.

At the start of August, when my coworkers (and what felt like the entire city) were giddy with excitement about the store opening, I had to suppress my inner Debbie Downer. I just couldn’t match, or really understand, the passion and enthusiasm that led an estimated 20,000 people to visit on opening day, some lining up from 4am.

But when I got a text from Joe Jones telling me he’d been running a semi-secret bar there since it opened, it got me.

Jones is one of the country’s best bartenders. He was behind one of Melbourne's great cocktail bars: Romeo Lane, which closed in 2022.

Planning for the Bourke Street store started years ago but, four weeks before opening Mecca, founder and co-CEO Jo Horgan decided she wanted to “go harder on the food offering”, as head of category innovation Bianca Georgiou tells Broadsheet. That meant turning the small Cafe Mecca space upstairs into a bar.

By day, you’ll find baked goods from Lune and Madeleine de Proust, and Seven Seeds Coffee served out of Mud ceramics. But Thursday through Sunday from 4pm, Jones flips it into one of the best places to get a cocktail in the city. “We turn the music up, the lights down, and it transitions into a bar space really beautifully,” says Georgiou.

For the next two weeks, the bar will serve Pommery champagne (Horgan’s favourite) and cocktails from Jones. Old Romeo Lane decanters and carafes have been pulled out of storage and line the back of the bar. Two Romeo Lane favourites have made appearances: the Negroni Pesca and the Black Butterfly. The former is a peach Negroni that Jones says he still gets asked to make at every event. The latter is a mixture of vodka, coffee, cognac, salt and water that “looks disgusting” before it’s filtered, then turns into “the silkiest poured Espresso Martini thing you’ve ever had”. As well as a Martini, there’s a Paloma, a Milk Punch Margarita that’s “very of the Romeo Lane ethos.”

It’s difficult to imagine a better fit for the bar. “My style has always been very minimalist, very functional and very feminine, overall,” he says.

He’s someone who understands the connection between disciplines. “Art and fashion and music and food and drink and sound and picture. It’s all the same stuff – it’s just painted with a different brush.” And then there’s the fact that he’s harboured an interest in perfume-making since he was a kid.

Jones admits that he’s by no means the first bartender to use methods also used in perfumery, but he says the knowledge he already had “went just through like the eye of a needle for this space”.

His drinks, including the Cafe Mecca Paloma, use “old-world perfumery techniques of extraction”. Grapefruit oil is extracted by decoction in the basement-level commercial kitchen built for the store, then it’s combined with lime leaf, rosehip oil and tequila.

The bar in its current form, will have its last day on Friday September 19. Shortly thereafter it will move to an entirely non-alc cocktail menu while the team waits for a permanent liquor licence. That’s when things will get really interesting.

“Being what you could politely describe as an advanced drinker, I’ll say that [making non-alcs] wasn’t on my list. It was born out of necessity,” says Jones. But it has become “better than the other thing … because no one’s ever done this to this level.”

The one non-alc currently on the menu, the Mecca Mocktail (soon to be renamed The Golden Spritz), has the same carbonation levels as Pommery, with a distillation of saffron, chamomile and honey, as well as verjuice and salted apricot syrup.

The next version of the drinks program will be “more naturalistic”, Jones says, with a focus on extraction, health and wellness. The new non-alc menu will “cast a net over what we already have”, using elements from the store’s perfumery, apothecary and in-house florist Flowers Vasette.

There’ll be a 50/50 split of cocktails and non-alc drinks when the licence eventually comes through, with the list to change seasonally. And the team has grander aspirations next spring, when it plans to take the drinks offering as a jumping off point to create what Georgiou describes as “a store in bloom”, matching drinks to fragrances, store design and more.

“You could broadly put it under the umbrella of experimental hospitality,” says Jones of what’s in store.

Of the flagship’s 200 points of innovation, the drinks might just become its most surprising drawcard.

Mecca Bourke Street
299 Bourke Street, Melbourne

Bar Hours:
Thu & Fri 4pm–9pm
Sat & Sun 4pm–7pm