Hotel dining is tricky. The perfect lobby bar/restaurant must cater to a huge variety of guests, from all around the world, with a broad range of preferences, likes and dislikes. You’ve got to be open all through the day, you have to have something for everyone and – ideally – you should be compelling enough to get some locals, not just guests, through the door too. It’s a tough plane to land.
But it looks like The Eve Hotel Sydney, which opens this summer as one of the lynchpins in Redfern’s new Wunderlich Lane precinct, is going to nail it with Bar Julius – an all-day bar and eatery by the Liquid & Larder crew (Bistecca, The Gidley, Alfie’s, The Rover).
“The lobby bar is your first point of contact at a hotel, and, if you’re a guest, the last point of contact while you wait for a taxi to take you home,” says Liquid & Larder’s group bars manager Ben Ingall. “It’s really integral to the whole hotel experience.
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SIGN UP“So we wanted to create this third space, this central hub for guests and locals, that’s really great for the area.”
With the exception of Alfie’s, with its loud artworks and concrete fit-out, the rest of Liquid & Larder’s venues all speak the same warm, classic, steakhouse-coded visual language. Bar Julius feels like a new design direction for the team, brought about from working within The Eve, which is modern, tropical and light-filled.
“Normally, one of our venues is a blank slate, but here we came into a space with some of the design elements already signed off, so we went into it and thought ‘Okay, this is what we’re working with’,” Ingall says. “And those limitations actually made it better.”
The result is a richly textured room filled with leather banquettes, wattle-coloured chairs and marble. It’s a room so inviting that it basically begs you to drop whatever plans you had and settle in. It’s crowned by a colourful ceiling-spanning artwork by Dinosaur Designs co-founder Louise Olsen. And, like all great all-day hotel restaurants, Bar Julius’s design is versatile. You can see yourself having a low-key brekkie and a coffee here – but you can just as easily imagine yourself having a big boozy meal into the wee hours.
The menu will dip heavily into the New York-style bistro canon. In the morning, that could be something simple like a bagel or a three-egg omelette showered in chives – or in the evening it could mean a classic Caesar salad or a burger. Expect a changing range of all-day brasserie classics, and knowing this team, steak is bound to be involved somewhere.
For drinks, alongside a tight and interesting wine list, Ingall is focusing on a cocktail offering that’s big on recognisable names like the Bloody Mary, delivered in surprising ways. Take the Crystal Mimosa – a crystal-clear Mimosa, poured tableside from a champagne bottle.
“Mimosas are always this drink that you have at a wedding, on a plane or at a family barbeque to kick things off, but they’re normally pretty rubbish,” Ingall says. “The champagne reacts to the orange juice and it goes flat – but here we have it dialled in and I’m really happy with the taste.
“I get a lot of enjoyment out of taking drinks that everyone knows and making them interesting.”
Bar Julius is due to open in mid-January 2025.
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