The Mayfair and Romeo Lane: Melbourne's classic cocktail bars

If you’re after the latest trends in cocktail trickery, bartender Joe Jones is not your guy. The co-owner of award-winning laneway bar Romeo Lane and New York-channelling supper club The Mayfair is a cheerleader for classic cocktails, proper glassware, quality spirits and drinks limited to two or three main ingredients.

“With some cocktails there’s so much redistilling and dehydrating and liquid nitrogen and bee pollen that you often get something that tastes more like an Aesop product than a drink,” Jones says.

“A great martini, on the other hand, leaves you no room to hide – you have to perfect technique and skill over a lifetime to really master a drink like that.” Anyone who’s had a Jones-prepared martini can attest that he knows what he’s talking about. Every element, from precise levels of chill and dilution to providing somewhere to dump your olive pits, is carefully considered.

Jones espouses the same philosophy in both his bars, despite them offering a noticeably different experience.

At tiny Romeo Lane, the crowd skews younger. There’s a queue out the door on the weekend and a thirst for drinks a step away from the classics.

At Romeo you might order a Safety Net, a mix of bourbon, honey, lime, fresh ginger and amontillado sherry, served up in a tall glass.

It’s a drink for those who appreciate a sour cola taste along with some chewy viscosity from the honey and a spicy ginger backbeat.

The Mayfair, with its live jazz, horseshoe booths and extravagant light fittings, attracts a slightly older demographic.

Here you might drink Jones’ variation on the classic Negroni. The Negroni Pesca swaps out the vermouth in the usual gin and Campari mix for rinquinquin, a French aperitif made with peaches.

It adds a sweet, juicy character while still underlining the savoury, dry parts of the original drink. When it comes to bar snacks, Jones, a former chef, sticks to the same “keep it simple” mantra as the drinks.

Jones suggest crudites with whipped mullet roe or pickled mussels served with rouille and potato crisps from The Mayfair, or house-made pickles or terrine from Romeo Lane.

Signature drink

Despite the recent explosion in Australian-made gins, Jones is not sold on any of them, preferring instead the classic London dry gin Beefeater. The Beefeater-based martini at both of his bars delivers one of the most exact forms of the drink in Melbourne.

pair it with …

Crunchy house-made pickles with just the right balance of acidity and sweetness.

“If I’m out drinking cocktails, I don’t want everything bombed with caviar or truffles,” he says. “I just want to taste the flavours.”

Just dropped

Innocent Bystander Moscato, 4 x 250ml cans, $25

Innocent Bystander is going all-out with the pink theme with its new moscato in a can. One for fans of sweet sparkle, it’s musk pink but stops short of being cloying via smart winemaking and the careful handling of black muscat and muscat gordo grapes from Victoria’s Swan Hill region. The can makes it very portable, the low alcohol content (1.1 standard drinks) is good for designated drivers and a relaxed persona means there’s no shame in drinking it through a straw or over ice.

● innocentbystander.
com.au