Bar 1854 takes you back in time
Opening this Friday inside The Cremorne Hotel, Bar 1854 is perfect for after-dinner cocktails.
“Bar 1854 came to me in a dream,” host and venue manager Grace Kelliher laughs as she tells CityMag. “Literally, it actually did.”
“I woke up one morning after this wild dream about opening a bar and it was really dark – I don’t know what I watched the night before, but something obviously stuck in my brain.”
Knowing there was a small vacant space on the first floor of the hotel in Unley, Grace pitched the idea to assistant venue manager Rashesh Shrestha as soon as she got to work.
“He’s a bar guru. He loves all of his whiskeys. He loves making cocktails,” Grace says.
“So I pitched it to him and he goes ‘that sounds really cool’.”
Named for the year The Cremorne Hotel opened, Bar 1854 is an intimate cocktail bar that specialises in quality drinks.
“It was a function space prior, but due to the heritage listing, we were very limited with what we can do and a lot of people don’t need a space this small,” Grace says.
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“People want functions to be a little bit bigger. You can really only comfortably fit 30 people up here. It really wasn’t working.
“30 people sitting down in a cocktail bar works.”
Inside Bar 1854Though The Cremorne Hotel – owned by growing SA venue business Duxton Pubs – and Bar 1854 are two separate offerings with different clientele, Grace says they will work together to cater to everyone, especially people looking for after-dinner drinks.
“We are really lucky within this area. We’ve got Bandit [Pizza & Wine] across the road, you’ve got Dolly and, of course, you’ve got us downstairs,” Grace says.
“So on a Friday, Saturday night, downstairs might not be your vibe, because we have a lot of young people coming through, or big families [so] it might be a little bit louder.
“This is going to be more of an escape for people. They can come up for a bit of a nightcap, and experience something completely different to what’s downstairs. It’s like two different worlds.”
Bar manager Brodie Heffernan says “the drinks are really the hero”, and the 15-item cocktail menu will have a range of experimentals and classics.
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“We’d hope that people want to give it a shot with those techniques that people may not have heard of as well… just people testing their comfort zone,” he says.
Brodie describes these techniques as “chef-ey methods” and “stuff you don’t get at a normal bar”.
“It’s all different ways of infusing flavours into these spirits and or giving another mouth feel to the drink. It just includes a lot more dimension to the drink,” he says.
The classic martini at Bar 1854One particular technique Brodie uses is fat washing for infusion which he describes as “messy, but that’s the fun of it”. Brodie uses this technique for mostly savoury drinks like a “freezer door martini” or a “burnt butter and truffle oil infused bourbon”.
“So typically you can use bacon fat for a more savoury flavour to a bourbon. In a sweeter drink, you might have say a rum fat washed with yogurt or something,” Brodie says.
“You’ll put those two things together in the same receptacle, and you’ll freeze it and basically just throughout this freezing process, they infuse.
“And then later on, you just rinse it through a filter. Hopefully, the fat stays in the filter and the alcohol in the rest.”
Other techniques Brodie uses include clarified milk punch which creates a “smoother mouth fill” by removing the impurities and tannins from the original ingredients.
Though the main focus of Bar 1854 is the alcohol offering, there will be a small menu including “late-night snacks”.
“We’ve got sashimi, some nice smoked peanuts, and olives. We’re doing a kimchi toasted sandwich…11 o’clock at night, chewing on one of those, I think will be great,” Grace says.
“We do want people to still enjoy a meal downstairs or even across the road, have a pizza or something.
“It’s not really a place where you’re going to come and have a meal. It’s more have a couple of drinks, feeling a bit peckish.”
Bar 1854 is opening this Friday and is located inside The Cremorne Hotel at Level 1, 207 Unley Road, Unley. Connect with the business on Instagram for more.