When owners Adam Ong and Michael Chen began the process of splitting their Hardware Lane bar, Golden Monkey, into two distinct venues they noticed an opportunity for symbolism that they couldn’t pass up.

“The Chinese Zodiac is a twelve-year cycle,” says Ong. So they chose to open the rejigged ground floor space “on the eighth of December, exactly twelve years to the day after Golden Monkey, to get that full circle”.

The new bar, East China Trading Company, now occupies the ground floor of the venue, with the hard-partying Golden Monkey limited to the basement below.

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“After twelve years, we knew that we wanted something different,” Ong says. “[We’re] on Hardware Lane – everybody kept walking past and nobody knew what we were, we seriously just looked like a little café that was perpetually closed.”

So the pair decided to create a venue with an all-day offering, which would make the most of their busy street frontage. To begin with East China Trading Company is open from 5pm, but an earlier start time will come to effect in the next few months.

The specialty here is rum, and Ong and Chen plan to stock more than 200 varieties of the stuff.

“We want to educate,” says Chen. “Usually rum is categorised in either colour, age or location.” At East China, the focus is also on conveying the different methods of production and distillation for each bottle.

Food-wise, dumplings are available throughout service. The menu will expand once the hours do.

Where downstairs’ Golden Monkey is themed around late-nineteenth century Shanghai opium dens, with its labyrinth of folding screens cast in sultry red lighting, East China Trading Company is inspired by the port of Shanghai in the early twentieth century, when it was the busiest port in east Asia.

Red paper lanterns greet visitors at the door, and beyond you’ll find jade-hued leather upholstery, and dark wood booths and stools.

East China Trading Company is noticeably more grown-up than its basement sibling, and according to Chen, that allows for rum connoisseurs and late-night revellers to exist comfortably in the same building.

“We want to jam, we want to party at times – but we also just want to sit there and appreciate things,” Chen says. “We’re really excited that we’ve got the two different kinds of ambiences and personalities.”

East China Trading Company
Rear 389 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne (entrance on Hardware Lane)
03 9602 2055

Hours:
Daily 5pm–11pm