Hamish Smith goes behind the curtain at Luke Whearty and Aki Nishikura's Byrdi in Melbourne - the bar the showcases Australia more than any other.
Byrdi – what’s the big idea?
The idea for Byrdi first came about in 2015 when we were in Singapore with Operation Dagger. My partner Aki Nishikura and I had the opportunity to run a pop-up in Cape Town, South Africa, for about 12 months. We realised what we had been missing in Singapore was the changing seasons and local produce.
That’s when we decided to create a bar focused on time and place, delivering an experience unique to Australia, specifically Victoria. This approach extends beyond just food and drinks. From the spirits and produce to the uniforms and most of the materials used to build the bar, everything is exclusively Australian and predominantly Victorian.
Tell us about your new menu
The idea behind our current menu – Sonder – is about looking elsewhere for inspiration and seeing things through other people’s eyes. We asked six of our favourite bartenders for their inspirations when creating their menus and designed a drink based on three key elements of inspiration for each bartender, naming a drink after them for this menu. It’s been an awesome experience getting into other people’s methods and the way they go about drink creation. Hopefully, it’s been cool for them to see their ideas get translated into physical creations.
A couple of examples: Monica Berg listed perfumery as a primary source of inspiration for her drinks-making.
We approached this drink like a master perfumer would, building a base or heart note of flavour and then building different accords around it. This drink is centred around the base note of bergamot and highlighted by pepperberry leaf from Tasmania, rose geranium and fennel pollen. Another example is Hampus Thunholm. For his drink, we centred it around one of his serves from Röda Huset called Almost Frozen Herbs. This serve is probably the one most similar to our own approach, heavily based on the changing seasons. We created a wild sorrel and parsley sorbet, paired with fermented apple wine, fortified with distilled green walnut. The final serve is almost a Sgroppino in style – super-fresh and herbal. Guests are really enjoying it.
Your bar seems to align with nature rather than work against it. Talk us through your approach
The changing seasons have a very strong influence on how we create the menus. We not only want to give people an experience that’s reflective of where we are, but also when. This can be as simple as foraging fresh flowers and leaves in the spring, or it can be more complex, like preserving different things that only have a short window in any given season. A good example of that is citrus in the winter. We get some amazing yuzu, bergamot and chinotto fruit from a local producer here in Victoria, and we try to get as much of it as we can while it’s in season. Then we use preservation techniques like fermentation or distillation to enable us to use the ingredient throughout the rest of the year.
Can you give us a taste of some of the more unusual Australian ingredients you use?
There are so many – my absolute favourite, though, is geraldton wax. It has such depth of flavour, ranging from grassy to citrusy, and holds up to many different extraction techniques, such as distillation, yielding amazing results. We’ve even made oils from the leaves, while the flowers have this interesting confectionery, bubble gum-type flavour and aroma, which is amazing in cocktails. Another fun discovery was bottlebrush.
The flowers from the bottlebrush tree have ginger-nut biscuit notes. We made bottlebrush spirit and paired it with quince and coffee to make a Highball. One that’s a bit more unusual is the resin or sap from the yuca plant, which is extracted after bushfires. It has such an intoxicating aroma when you burn the sap and once distilled, it’s something unique – so perfumed and delicate.
Your menu doesn’t include mention of brands. What spirits do you use?
This is something I’ve been doing for quite some time. It started as a way to get guests to think of drinks or choose drinks from the menu based on flavour rather than spirit categories. At Byrdi, we exclusively use Australian spirits. There are so many amazing Australian distilleries, and our approach forces us to engage with guests, leading to more organic conversations. We often end up at the table with a bottle, tasting it in its raw state, which is a more powerful and memorable experience. We also distil many of our own spirits – listing the whole process can be overwhelming, so we just list the main flavours or ingredients in each drink. We aim to keep it simple. Drinking should be fun, not a science lesson.
Has working in this way improved you and your team as bartenders?
Thinking about drinks this way forces you out of your comfort zone. It makes you proactive in planning for upcoming seasons and creative in handling limited supplies of certain ingredients that might not last the whole season. I think it also encourages a more responsible and sustainable approach – being aware of what nature provides and not consuming beyond your means. The most important thing is that it gives real heart and soul to the drinks, which translates to the guest and is invaluable.
What has the reception been like in Melbourne?
Melbourne has such a rich and dynamic culture, which made it easy to introduce people to a concept that isn’t traditional and challenges perceptions a bit. There’s been a big post-Covid movement in Australia to support local businesses, so Byrdi’s focus on using exclusively Australian products and collaborating with local farmers, producers and artisans has really resonated. The support from the community here has been amazing. It’s also an exciting time for the Melbourne bar scene. I don’t think it will be long before Melbourne is seen as a trailblazer in the global cocktail scene