The team behind a popular north-side venue is gearing up to open Moondrop, a Chinese-inspired bar with big ambitions. “We want to be the best bar in Australia.”
It was a shock when Michael and Zara Madrusan’s pre-eminent cocktail bar The Everleigh went into liquidation in March after 14 years on Gertrude Street in Fitzroy.
But a few months after the closure, a new team stepped in to give the storied space a new lease on life. It reopens this Thursday as Chinese-inspired cocktail bar Moondrop.
Behind it is Steve Chan, owner of Carlton North cafe and wine bar Sleepy’s, whose Chinese heritage is front and centre in everything, from the redesign to the drinks.
“I love sharing my culture through Sleepy’s,” he says. The headline dish there might be its Chinese bolognese toastie. “When it comes to Chinese bars and cocktails, though there are some [in Melbourne], there’s room to really flesh that concept out.”
The Everleigh was where Chan tried his first sour cocktail. “I’ll never forget it because it put cocktails on the map for me,” he says.
In securing such an iconic site for Moondrop and going through R&D with his business partners – former Above Board bar manager Jesse Kourmouzis and Sleepy’s chef Jacob Muoio – the goalposts shifted.
“We always wanted to be great,” says Chan. “But now we want to be the best bar in Australia.”
Moondrop has preserved some of The Everleigh’s 1920s style, but pivoted from the Western world to the East, channelling “the Roaring Twenties of Shanghai”.
While the layout remains much the same, most of the walls have been splashed crimson red. White drapery now hangs above the main room, rippling in the breeze of ceiling fans and framing a pendant light meant to emulate the moon. Beneath this is the bar, still wrapped in its original timber panelling but newly tiled on top, with some tiles featuring playfully hand-painted illustrations by the Moondrop team.
The bar is Kourmouzis’ domain, where he shakes and stirs cocktails with a Chinese edge.
The martini-like M.S. Gibson is laced with baijiu – a potent, pungent spirit that Chan calls “China’s moonshine” – and, as its name suggests, the flavour-enhancing MSG.
The Chanhattan is an ode to the Manhattans Chan would order every time he visited Kourmouzis at Above Board, bolstered by lapsang souchong, the smoky Chinese black tea.
Wines tie into the theme, including some from nomadic winemaker Ian Dai, whose label Xiao Pu uses grapes grown across China. Chan can’t get enough of the Tangerine, a skin-contact chardonnay that “tastes as tangerine-y as you think”.
Muoio’s Chinese-ish menu is made up of snacks you could stack into a meal. Toolunka Creek olives are marinated in Sichuan pepper, cheddar tartlets are enhanced with quince and osmanthus, and there are three types of house-made dumplings to choose from including pork and chrysanthemum. Or you can splash out on kaluga caviar from China, which comes with spring onion pikelets, creme fraiche and chives.
And for dessert? “I love mooncakes and I love ice-cream,” says Chan, so Muoio created a hybrid. Chewy mochi-like snow-skin mooncakes are made with glutinous rice flour, stamped with Moondrop branding and filled with vanilla and red-bean ice-cream.
Moondrop opens on Thursday, December 4.
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