Expect plenty of Portuguese and Spanish wine alongside snacks and MYO deli boards. Plus, two of Brisbane’s best barkeeps are along for the ride.
Hannah Wagner wasn’t intending to open another venue. Not yet, anyway.
“I was, like, ‘Oh, now? Now is a time to rest,’” Wagner says, laughing.
A time to rest because Wagner owns and operates Dark Red in Fortitude Valley. Over the past two years, she’s built this little bar that could in Bakery Lane into one of the inner suburbs’ buzziest wine spots. Much of the popularity is down to Wagner herself, whose skill in communicating about wine is at the centre of the business.
Now, she’s expanding across Ann Street to Winn Lane to open the 30-seat Dark Blue in the neighbouring tenancies formerly occupied by Gemini Studio and Winnston Hair.
Located on the ground floor of the heritage-listed Shannon’s Building, best known for Crowbar (and before that, The Zoo) upstairs, it’s a very different space to Dark Red’s relatively new Bakery Lane premises.
“Arthur [Apostolos, who owns the Bakery Lane and Winn Lane precincts] showed me the space and I fell in love with it, with all of its exposed brick,” Wagner says. “It’s just absolutely gorgeous. Some people would be like, ‘It needs a lot of work,’ but I didn’t want to touch it. There’s something in me that thinks, the weirder the better.”
Dark Blue will differentiate itself from Dark Red by focusing on wines from Spain, Portugal and Argentina. Wagner reckons the initial list will run to around 50 bottles – “I’m really going to lean into selling bottles and setting the venue up more for groups,” she says – backed by a signature and classic cocktails from gun barkeep Charlie Hunter, who arrives from Savile Row.
There will also be snacks such as tinned sardines, Superbon Madrid crisps and deli boards you can compile yourself from a selection of meats and cheeses at the counter.
Hunter, though, isn’t the only new addition to Wagner’s team with star barkeep Ellery Low crossing the river to take over the day-to-day running of Dark Red. Low is best known for his many years at top cocktail bar Maker in Fish Lane, and last year won the Australian edition of the annual Vero Bartender awards, which took him to Italy in April to compete in the international finals.
“Maker has always been one of my favourite Brisbane bars, in terms of a place to just sit and relax in,” Wagner says. “Ellery’s ideas are fantastic. He came with some stuff that really suited Dark Red, but also really elevated it.
“I couldn’t have never have envisioned having people like Ellery and Charlie working with me. We work so well together. It feels like I’m working with them rather than [them working for me], for sure.”
Dark Blue will open in Winn Lane in mid-April.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
