Visiting Melbourne’s Bar Clara delivers an authentic experience of inspired cocktails created with theatrical flair from fresh and local ingredients with seasonality at its heart.
Even though Bar Clara is set up in a below-street-level concrete bunker, the atmosphere is warm, cosy and welcoming. Lounges of green velvet rim the space, and flower and leaf wall installations bring the outside in and nods to Clara’s focus on seasonality.
Owner Joel McKenzie explains it was at his first job at a wine bar that he first fell in love with what he calls the golden hour when people come together around food and good drinks to enjoy each other’s company. For McKenzie, that was when he knew he wanted to create memorable drinks as a career.
The cocktails at Bar Clara use ingredients created by McKenzie and deliver flavours unique to him and his venue. McKenzie says much of his inspiration comes from industry legend Dave Arnold and his book Liquid Intelligence. New York-based Arnold is renowned for his pioneering use of clarification and a centrifuge to harness flavour from natural ingredients through his food and drinks research lab, Booker and Dax, in New York.
“He pioneered a lot of how we bring technique to cocktail making. He designed the centrifuge we have at Bar Clara as a solution for bars and kitchens,” says McKenzie.
At Bar Clara, McKenzie rotates a seasonal cocktail menu with a couple of mainstays, such as the banana-inspired Whisky Sour, the Banoffee Special cocktail and the fresh tequila-based Dama Verde.
“It’s really enjoyable, creating something delicious, but there’s a fair bit of creativity to it. Especially with our seasonal cocktails, there is this extra depth to the process where you are working with fresh ingredients and ingredients that have their own story,” says McKenzie.
McKenzie says Bar Clara focuses on two important elements: seasonality and flavour. He says they focus on modern techniques to inspire and excite with new and concentrated flavour profiles through the use of the centrifuge and clarifications, as well as sous vide syrups to preserve flavour.
“We didn’t want to end up like a 2000s college bar serving neon liqueurs, and we also didn’t want to be a stuffy cocktail renaissance bar where everything’s 90 mLs of booze with a little bit of sugar and bitters; we wanted to have variety, a bit more authenticity in terms of the flavours we offer.”
McKenzie’s piece de resistance is the Banoffee Special cocktail. The inspiration came from pairing bananas with American whisky and using a clarification process to harness the authentic taste of fresh bananas. The result is a spin-off Whisky Sour using banana-infused whiskey, lemon juice and the Bar Clara sweetener, which in this case is a banana oleo.
“We weren’t getting that depth of a kind of caramelised banana. So, then we moved to dark sugar, and we had all these banana skins, and that’s how we discovered making an oleo with the banana skins and the dark sugar, which reinforced the flavour again.
“It’s been a process, but the Banoffee Special has been on our list for five years. I think it’s the standout,” says McKenzie.
After the Sour is made with the infused banana whiskey and banana oleo, McKenzie tops the glass off with whipped meringue before toasting it with a blow torch. The theatre in the making is a welcomed spectacle, and the cocktail is delicious and memorable; lovers of bananas need only apply as the taste is the real deal.
A Bar Clara current seasonal cocktail is the Dama Verde, a fresh take on a Mojito using fresh cucumber lining a tumbler glass, pineapple and coriander to deliver clean flavours with a jalapeno smoky finish. McKenzie says he is pleased with how Dama Verde turned out. “It’s a real progressive drink that moves you through the flavours as you sip it,” says McKenzie.
Global bars such as the Nightjar in the UK inspire McKenzie’s drink creativity. “I always love to see their creativity with their drinks and presentation.
“More recently, Bar Chef in Toronto, they do some cool stuff around seasonality and, as the name implies, use culinary techniques with their cocktails.”
Another was a recent visit to Tokyo and a bar named Codename Mixology, where McKenzie sampled its Blue Cheese Martini.
“That was good. We tried to replicate it, but something special is coming out next year. It’s still not quite there, but I’ve made a Martini using a blue cheese stuffed olive.”
Bar Clara is at 87 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne. Visit barclara.com
