In Sydney’s Redfern, a certain radioactive-green drink caught the Hospitality team’s attention on a recent visit to House Made Hospitality’s newest venue Baptist Street Rec. Club. It was a Japanese Slipper — a cocktail with a borderline outrageous hue thanks to the presence of melon liqueur. It also had a watermelon ball garnish and fit right in with the Australiana theme of the bar.
House Made has shaken things up (excuse the pun) to ensure the Slipper’s relevance on a modern menu. Its version of the drink features Marrickville’s Chelloh! Yuzucello, rosemary, and finger lime. The decision to use the native citrus stems from a pointed effort to feature local produce across group venues. Native ingredients are prevalent at both Tilda and Bar Tilda — a strawberry vodka gimlet swaps regular lime for finger lime, and the addition of strawberry gum and lavender bitters gives the drink its classic floral notes.
Meanwhile, the saltbush martini uses the native plant to deliver a uniquely savoury aspect to the drink. “At Bar Tilda we use the term, ‘Celebrating luxury Australian drinking’,” says House Made Hospitality Beverage Director Jason Williams. “That comes through the high-profile wines, the beautiful spirits, and the well-crafted cocktails but also through storytelling. We try to seamlessly integrate native Australian botanicals where it’s applicable, rather than being at the forefront of it. It’s meant to be part of the holistic experience.”
The approach is woven throughout the venue. Banjo Patterson’s Waltzing Matilda sits unobtrusively at the start of the menu, a hint at both the restaurant’s namesake and the inspiration behind the offering. It’s also evident in the saltbush martini with green apple — a drink that came from Williams’ own love of savoury martinis and the Gibson. House Made wanted to ensure they had a few savoury or “vinegary” martinis on the menu, particularly due to the large number of international and American visitors to the hotel. “I absolutely love saltbush, but I hadn’t seen it explored much in cocktails,” says Williams. “I thought if we were going to do a savoury, pickle-y martini, then let’s use it. It has the salt and is also herbaceous.”
Tilda uses Hickson House Harbour Strength gin, which has botanicals of saltbush and other native ingredients. “It comes in at 60 per cent proof, so I knew it was a martini I was going to be creating for myself — strong, dry, salty, and umami,” says Williams. The drinks expert had also recently seen green apple paired with saltbush on a menu, and was inspired to create a green apple vermouth. One of the final components of the drink is a few dashes of saltbush tincture, which is made by mixing dry, ground saltbush with high-proof ethanol, before it’s garnished with a lemon coin.
Williams has a lot of love for the suppliers he works with, and makes efforts to champion them where he can. Bar Tilda’s menu, for example, features Golden Wattle soda by Mischief Brew which is made with handpicked wattle from Adnyamathanha Country as well as a prebatched RTD wattle seed Old Fashioned from Starward Distillery. “We try to support producers that use native Australian botanical products in a modern way,” he says.
Halfway through lockdown, Tom Opie’s partner purchased him a few books on fermentation. The drink-slinger had long been interested in sustainability, having run Births and Deaths in Wollongong as an almost entirely waste-free bar until 2022, but fermentation opened up a new world. “I got really into breaking things down in their entirety,” he says. “Say you make an oleo with grapefruit, you still throw heaps of the peel out, so it’s not that sustainable… You’re still creating a lot of stress on the ecosystem. Whereas if you break that down into a liquid and drink it, it’s much more sustainable.”
The approach saw the bartender become interested in mycelium — the name for a type of network of fungal filaments. While it might stir memories of the fungal strands that zombify the cast in The Last of Us, Opie’s methods are far less insidious. He first began learning how to use koji — a type of mould that buries itself in rice — and his passion expanded from there. “I learned you could create these crazy things without much stress on the environment,” says Opie. “We were using things like liquid potato in drinks.” Now, he’s using these processes alongside native ingredients at The Waratah in Darlinghurst.
The restaurant and bar is centered around native ingredients in a way that isn’t “tokenistic”, says Opie. The team prioritises the Country on which the products were grown, the producers who made them, the story behind them, the intricacies of flavour, and the extent to which each ingredient can be used. On The Waratah’s current menu, Drinking Australia: Volume 3, Citrus and Pineapple combines two of Opie’s passions: using both mycelium and a freshly foraged native ingredient — in this case, lemon aspen from Naway Yila Buradja in Mudgee. Opie asked Nathan Lovett, owner of Naway Yila Buradja, what he thought would work well with the lemon aspen before conducting some trials. “Lemon aspen has a lovely candied sherbet lemon flavour to it, so we used that in a Sgroppino/Piña Colada serve with coconut amazake gelato,” says Opie.
To make the drink, Opie blends lemon aspen to make a cordial for acidity. He then distils the lemon aspen to make a liqueur. “It’s basically layering a lot of things on top of each other,” he says. The bartender then makes amazake — a traditional Japanese low-alcohol drink made from koji ferment. The fermentation process of the rice creates a white blanket of mycelium, which is blended with coconut to create a “gelato of sorts”, says Opie. While gelato is typically sweet, the fermentation process generates a more savoury alternative. Opie then adds finger limes from Sian Hromek at Boogerum Falls in Arakwal Country (in the Northern Rivers) for acidity and florality, pineapple cordial, and Archie Rose white cane rum, “which has these bubbly tropical esters like banana and pineapple”.
The mixture is blended and served in a hurricane glass. “We obviously want to do things that are refined and a bit more delicate, but when you’re trying to create the story of connection, you want something a bit more recognisable, you know?” laughs Opie. Finally, the drink is garnished with a lemon aspen dust made from blended dehydrated lemon aspen and shio koji (a fermented Japanese condiment). “It’s a little bit sweet, a little bit citrusy, but super floral. People across the bar will be like ‘Oh man, what’s that smell?’ Because it smells like sherbet.”
The bartender also takes care to ensure there are non-alcoholic options on the menu that are both high quality and provide value for money. “We want to create non alcoholic drinks that give texture and body and make people feel like they’re drinking booze,” says Opie. “They don’t want to feel like they’re missing out or like they’re being ripped off when you’re paying $16 for what is essentially juice.”
On the current menu, there are two non-alcoholic drinks that are given the same treatment as the eight other cocktails. To create the Cherry and Rose, Opie pits and vacuum seals cherries with verjus (the unfermented part of grape juice) sourced from Margan Wines in the Hunter Valley. He then makes a wild rose tea by macerating rose with native botanicals including strawberry gum. He then creates Ooray plum cordial before combining the elements together and carbonating. “The good thing about Ooray plums is their jammy texture,” says the bartender. “We blend them and extract all the pectin and use that to thicken the mixture so it becomes more unctuous and flavourful.”
The drink is served in a sparkling wine glass without garnish. Ingredients at The Waratah are used to both inform drinks and educate guests. For people wanting to use native ingredients, Opie says it’s important to have a connection to the land or the people in the area and to learn the stories and language of the ingredients. “At the end of the day, we’re using things that are stolen in a way, so paying homage to the people who made them possible is important, not just to develop a story, but to pay homage to Aboriginal ancestors.”
This story appeared in the March-April 2025 edition of Hospitality Magazine. Subscribe here.
