Helium Balloons, Liquid Nitrogen and Banana Skins in Your Cocktail?

Once he left the cricket pitch behind in the early 2000s, former Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire fast bowler Matt Whiley quickly found himself working behind a bar. You might call it serendipity, but his first shift was pure coincidence.

“It happened on a Friday evening. I was sat at the bar, and the person who was supposed to work an event upstairs never showed up,” Whiley says. “The manager was like, ‘Do you fancy helping out?’”

That chance beginning has since led Whiley to working in – and, in some ways, leading – the bar scenes in London and Sydney. There was his sustainability-focused bar Scout in London, which popped up for a year-long Sydney residency in 2019, before he opened the pioneering zero-waste bar Re in Sydney’s Eveleigh in 2021. Both have since closed.

Whiley’s eclectic, creative and scientific style emerged right from the start. “At my first bar, we wanted to bring the sort of drinks that you would see in a cocktail competition where bartenders would make them with all of the theatrics and everything,” he says.

Striking a balance between drama and drinkability has since become Whiley’s trademark, with boundary-pushing creations like his cult-hit, pig’s-blood-infused Bloody Mary (which used a vodka distilled with real pig’s blood). Underneath the flash, though, Whiley has also long been driven by sustainability, at times removing ingredients like citrus from menus if it’s not locally produced, and repurposing low-quality or waste products in his cocktails.

“I just think that is a missed opportunity for venues, especially as the cost of living and the cost of goods is going up, where we have the opportunity to keep what we offer to the guests and consumer at a good price, because we’re actually being conscious about where our produce is coming from,” he says.

Whiley’s latest project is the new menu at Curious, the subterranean bar underneath Melbourne’s W Hotel. It’s a true culmination of his forward-thinking approach to cocktails: blending creativity with a scientific approach, and riffing on states of matter like solid, liquid, gas and plasma. It also champions sustainability, local produce and Victoriana, drawing inspiration from the city centre and the far-flung corners of the state.

“The delivery of the drink is around the states of matter, but then weaving in the idea of the salt plains of Victoria, walking through Chinatown – the sensory experience of being in that environment,” Whiley says. “It’s utilising all of your senses, but then bringing to life a totally unique menu.”

The result is something like a whimsical, boozy science class, with Whiley’s drinks seeming to defy logic. Take his Wizz Fizz cocktail, which falls under the category of “gas” and harks back to a time when magic shops were common in Melbourne. The cocktail blends peach kombucha, guava leaf, Campari and sparkling wine – but it’s the attached balloon that brings the magic.

“The balloon has a peach aroma that’s injected inside, and it’s filled with helium,” Whiley says. “Then it’s attached to a magician’s string that’s connected to the glass. The server, when they bring it to the table, will burn the string, the balloon will fly up and it’ll blow up, and then the peach aroma will be filled across the table.”

One of Whiley’s strongest sensory memories of Victoria is the smell of backburning in the country, and that concept drives the cocktail Pyro Flora. “It’s got strawberry gum, lemon myrtle, burnt pear and then mastiha – which is a liqueur from Greece – with a similar sort of resinous taste that you would get from a gum tree,” Whiley says. “It’s also got that smokiness from burnt pear, and then we smoke lemon myrtle leaves at the table.”

There are uniquely sustainable techniques too, like a koji-cured banana skin that tastes surprisingly like olives in the Martini-like drink Aeon Drift. For Whiley and his team, though, the best drink on the menu isn’t even a drink. The “cocktail”, called Cryocone, is inspired by a dessert at New York’s famed molecular gastronomy restaurant WD-50 and transforms into ice-cream.

“It’s a burnt butter ice-cream base with whisky, bacon-infused vodka and maple raisin vodka,” Whiley says. “It’s in liquid form, you order it, and then we add liquid nitrogen to chill it super fast to create an ice-cream on the spot.”

For Whiley, the menu might be wildly adventurous, but it’s all part of what makes his cocktail philosophy so impressive and important. “I believe that if we have the equipment available, we can make anything we want,” he says. “As long as we stick to the directive of, ‘It needs to be desirable and delicious at the same time’, the scope of what you can make is endless.”

Curious is open Tuesday to Saturday from 5pm with live music every Thursday to Saturday. Book your table here

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with W Melbourne.