Absinthe Salon Bar Sydney

 

OPENED by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore as an acknowledgement of her “revolutionary” small bar liquor licensing laws, this 19th-century themed bar is nestled in the bottom level of a terrace house and, buyer beware, the thick smell of aniseed on arrival takes some getting used to. Like, a good five minutes.

With a three-drink limit, the scary ingredients of the once-banned hallucinogenic elixir have been removed, but it’s still totally intoxicating.

Drinking here is about the event – being served from an hourglassesque water fountain with taps attached to the base.

You sit a glass with a shot of “the green fairy” in it underneath a tap and the water drips slowly onto a sugar cube, suspended atop your glass by a spoon. Once the sugar dissolves, it’s time to cheers.
Perfect for pre-drinks.

 

Absinthe Salon is not the sort of bar Sydney is used to. In fact, it’s hard to imagine who, apart from Sydney goths, will be drinking here on a very regular basis. But few people will be able to resist at least having a look.

Here you drink absinthe, and absinthe only. And you can only have a maximum of three pourings (you actually wouldn’t want to drink any more than that, anyway, lest you turn into a little green fairy yourself). And you have to book a table to drink here.

 

There’s an entire ritual involved with drinking absinthe here, and owners Gaye Valttila and Joop van Heusden really know their stuff. They’re also very keen to share their knowledge with you. Once you’ve made your booking and turned up to the dark little building on Albion Street, you’ll ring the doorbell and they’ll let you in. You’ll be led through to the salon, where tiny little tables are dotted around the room, each one with a different absinthe ‘fountain’

 

Absinthe Salon is the first Sydney small bar doing something apart from just being small. Whether Sydney’s ready for an absinthe-only bar remains to be seen. But maybe this is exactly what we need to take our drinking culture to the next level