Byrdi

A Yarra Valley pear gets poached, dehydrated, rehydrated with smoke and distilled into a spirit that tastes like mezcal. That drink is called Not Mezcal, and it came off the opening menu of a bar sitting inside a Melbourne Central food hall.

Why go

Luke Whearty and Aki Nishikura ran Operation Dagger in Singapore, a bar that reached the top 30 in the world, and came home in 2019 to build this one. The lab off the side of the bar runs rotary evaporators, and the drinks are assembled from things the team made rather than bought. There is no processed sugar in the building. Sweetening comes from honey out of Steels Creek in the Yarra Valley, and a lot of the plant material is wild-harvested through Spurrell Foraging and Outback Chef (Broadsheet). One opening drink, Now & Then, put last spring's fermented berries against a wine made from new-season wattle, and that wattle wine was earmarked to become the base of the following year's drink. Ten cocktails now, rewritten weekly (Byrdi). Sam Bygrave noted the thing a bartender clocks first: there are no spirit brands visible on the menu or the back bar, which is the opposite of how most serious cocktail rooms advertise their seriousness.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the martini, whichever native ingredient is carrying it that week. The Nice One Gary if it is still on, lacto-fermented Valencia orange with Davidson plum, which Emily Morrison described as "fluffy, acidic and bright" ref. Snacks are prawn toast with pepperberry mayo, and Shark Bay scallops with chicken fat and soy.
• Avoid: looking for a laneway or a hidden door. The entrance is a nondescript one off a shopping-centre floor. Do not try to book, and do not plan dinner here.

What locals & experts say

• Emily Morrison, Time Out Melbourne, four stars (2024): "We didn't have a single unimpressive drink at Byrdi, and you most certainly won't either." Her reservation, in the same piece, is the useful part: the Dier Maker combines distilled sheep's milk, reduced oak, shio koji and mountain marigold, and "despite the adventurous blend, the result tastes as familiar as a pet nat." ref
• Sam Bygrave, Australian Bartender (2020): "you don't expect to find a world class, avant-garde cocktail bar here. But that's exactly what you get." He tasted the smoked pear distillate on its own and wrote that you would be hard-pressed not to call it mezcal. ref
• The World's 50 Best Bars: a new entry at No.80 in 2020, No.35 in 2024, No.91 in 2025. The 50 Best page calls it "complete with its own lab for creating bold new ingredients" and puts the average cocktail at $19. ref
• The trade, this year: a finalist for both Cocktail Bar of the Year and Best Bar Food at the 25th Australian Bar Awards, announced 14 July 2026. Those are peer votes from working bar people, and they are the most current evidence on this room. Winners land 16 September 2026. ref
• No Victorian critic found. Good Food, The Age and Gourmet Traveller were searched on 1 August 2026 and none carries a signed review of this bar. Time Out and the bar trade press are carrying the judgment here, and that is worth knowing before you build a night around it.

Good to know

• Where: 211 La Trobe Street, tenancy GD075, inside the Ella precinct at Melbourne Central. The master list had this in Curtin House on a fifth floor, which is wrong and has been fixed.
• Timing: daily, 5pm to midnight.
• Booking: none taken. Walk in.
• The current format: the room is running a version of itself called Ephemera, described by the team as "a transient wine bar and kitchen built around what exists right now." The wine list went from six pours to twenty Australian wines by the glass, and the food shrank to snacks (Broadsheet). Check before you go.
• Safety: Victoria publishes no per-venue hygiene rating. Safe Food Victoria's register of court convictions under the Food Act 1984 was read in full on 1 August 2026 and does not list this venue. ref

Jeff's take (his words)

• Note: none. Melbourne has no saved-places export in the repo, so nothing here can be traced to Jeff's own words.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

should-visit — A bar with a rotary evaporator behind it, in a shopping-centre food hall, taking walk-ins only. Luke Whearty and Aki Nishikura came back from Operation Dagger in Singapore and built the drinks out of the state they landed in: poached Yarra Valley pears dehydrated, smoked and distilled until the result reads as mezcal, fermented berries held over from one spring to seed the next year's drink, honey from Steels Creek instead of sugar because there is no processed sugar in the building. Ten cocktails, rewritten weekly. Time Out's Emily Morrison gave it four stars and did not find a weak drink. It sits at should-visit rather than higher for two reasons stated plainly: the 50 Best placing slid from No.35 in 2024 to No.91 in 2025, and the room is currently running Ephemera, a deliberately temporary wine-led version of itself. Go for the drinks and the technique, eat somewhere else.