Give the people a place they can hardly find and they’ll work obsessively to find it, lead their friends there like some sort of gastronomic Pied Pipers, and soon there will be a queue so long outside it will be easy to find. So it is at Eau De Vie. Or so I thought until I actually turned up to this prohibition-look den of drinking and whiskey with my ineffable grasp of what makes a place popular. I was completely wrong.

There they were in serried ranks, the people; down an unromantic back alley called Malthouse, nothing but a gas lamp to mark the spot, queuing for cocktails and Beluga caviar. A heavy door marks the spot and opens to a flirty, dark room that’s washed with jazz, where the spotlight, quite literally, is on the alcohol. “Boy am I glad we finally found it,” I cry. It’s exciting to be here, a secret club that everyone knows about, the Melbourne branch of Sven Almenning’s World Class drinking venues.

Copious bottles of alcohol line the walls, the bar, and the whisk(e)y collection is so vast it gets its own room. If you’re serious, you can procure a locker to stash your own bottle. They pull out all the stops on cocktails. There’s shaking, freezing with liquid nitrogen, setting drinks of fire, setting citrus zest on fire. Your martini is snap-chilled with nitrogen, and comes in 16 varieties of vodka or gin, celery, peach, Angostura, chocolate, grapefruit and other bitters, there are five choices for rinses and brines, and the garnish list is extensive. A yuzu mule comes in a copper cup, and is a zingy mix of sour and ginger-beer sweet.

Come for the cocktails, stay for the croque monsieur brioche with champagne ham and truffle béchamel, and return knowing that next time there’s more than a queue to recommend it.

Tel: (03) 8393 9367

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