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Palmer & Co. alumni Toby Marshall and Sam Egerton are behind the innovative cocktail menu at Merivale’s new basement bar, Charlie Parker’s
Credit: Supplied courtesy of Merivale

“Names can get in the way of drinks and create preconceptions,” says Sam Egerton, one half of the dynamic duo behind the innovative, exhaustive menu at Paddington’s newest neighbourhood basement bar, Charlie Parker’s.

The seasoned mixologist is (rather aptly) dissecting the eight cocktails he has created alongside fellow Palmer & Co. alumni Toby Marshall. Together they’ve crafted the at-times esoteric cocktail list for the Merivale group’s newest Oxford Street venue, which adjoins both The Paddington and Head Chef Danielle Alvarez’s 60-seater farm to table restaurant, Fred’s.

The cocktail component of the menu, available across both venues, has been approached with all the rigour and wonder of a lifelong botanist set loose in a greenhouse for the first time. Not unlike a botanist’s notebook, it’s drawn and quartered into Nuts and Fruits, Leaves and Flowers and so on, with each part of a plant’s anatomy corresponding to a cocktail created with a ‘waste not, want not’ ethos in mind.

It’s an end-to-end approach that shares an affinity with the du jour nose-to-tail food movement, with origins traceable to some of London’s pioneering no-waste cocktail bars.

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Fred’s Head Chef Danielle Alvarez and cocktail duo Sam Egerton and Toby Marshall have crafted complimentary menus that privilege produce and pair a farm-to-table ethos with innovate techniques that reduce waste
Credit: Supplied

The menu reads as many contemporary food menus do (a shopping list of ingredients, with little context), and was developed over a long gestation period of two years that allowed for thorough, extensive research while both bar and restaurant found their feet. There are no puns or gimmicks, no contrived narratives that might lead a reader astray based on assumptions of what drinks they like. The cocktails themselves are not seasonal, though they’re “seasonally lead and made in runs”, with much of the grunt work performed outside of service hours and back of house, where each element of the drink is pulled apart, dissected and reassembled with a fastidious attention to detail.

Take one cocktail under the Nut and Fruit section. Its ingredients are listed in their simplest form (burnt pecan, pisco, mandarin reduction, oloroso) but its execution is much more complex. A rotary evaporator of the kind used by restaurants like Melbourne’s award-winning Attica, (“equipment bars don’t usually have access to that often, says Egerton”) is used to extract flavour from the smoked pecan shells, flavour that is then distilled into the pisco; a dehydrator turns the pulp into a mandarin leather, used as a garnish; as is the skin, which is used to create a spirit-based bitter; and finally, the pecans themselves are turned into a sweetened Orgreat syrup, all of which is served long and thoroughly iced. 

Another, the Forest Floor (scotch, redwood bark, stone wash, moss) infuses moss and metamorphic schist rock from Queenstown into whiskey using the same evaporator infusion method. Another sure to pique interest (Kikuyu grass, nasturtium, jasmine) known as the Centennial Park infuses grass and flower clippings from the nearby park into vodka and Lillet Blanc. The result is something akin to a martini drenched in spring sunlight, with vegetal top notes and a floral, fiery afterglow. A star of jasmine completes the drink.

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The ‘Centennial Park’ at Charlie Parker’s (Kikuyu grass, nasturtium, jasmine)
Credit: Supplied 

The remainder of the menu runs a gamut from locally sourced beers and spirits to an extensive wine list that focuses on small-batch wines. There’s a strong Australian focus on the back bar, and everything that made the final cut (there’s a lot on offer) had to pass a three fold check process: that it have a good story, great packaging and taste even better – or a “wine approach to spirits”, says Marshall.

Alvarez, who trained under under Alice Waters at Californian institution Chez Panisse, has also created a bar menu to complement the drinks including Salt Beef croquettes with hot mustard and pickles; a daily changing housemade flatbread; a moreish Veal Tartare Caesar doused in pangrattato and pecorino; and finished off with a rich burnt caramel ice cream topped with a shot of Goslings Rum.

Unsurprisingly, the latter is just as intoxicating as the cocktails, meaning you’re going to want to order one per person (at least) and settle in for a long night.

Tile and cover image: Supplied courtesy of Merivale