House of Corrections
Address Level 4, 264 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Open Daily 4pm-3am
Sorry to disappoint, BDSM and prison fans. The bar formerly known as Goldilocks, renamed to celebrate the Swanston Street building's history as porn cinema Shaft, is less kinksville and more 50-shades-of-modern-drinks.
You may remember Goldilocks simply as the place you walked through to get to its rooftop deck (where it's business as usual), or the bar above Noodle Kingdom (now a dumpling house called Mr Kwok).
But everything has changed for the better. The look is an authoritarian dream. Mesh and raw plaster. Mustard-coloured booths and metal tables. The command deck is a frosty length of pale wood and stainless steel ringed with tan bar stools. If pure ice, Delta blues and straight-edge Bauhaus design do it for you, you may just break a little sweat yet.
The only catch for cocktail noobs is you might want to grab a stool. It's a menu that needs explaining. Cocktails here are an untitled lists of ingredients. Those ingredients include chamomile, chai-infused tequila and aquafaba, the chickpea goop that magically works like egg white. If that doesn't make you thirsty, well, I get it, but roll the dice anyway.
What sounds weird on paper is much more familiar in the glass. Case in coupette: the shake-up of pineapple, lime, white rum, manzanilla and spiced sugar syrup drinks like a nutty and tropical daiquiri. And that chai-infused tequila, amber-hued, tannic and washed up over a block of pure ice could be a Mexican old fashioned by way of New Delhi.
The big revelation for vegans and drinkers everywhere is that chickpea brine is not gross, but good. The head holds, doesn't have eggy stank and seasons the rest of the party of sloe gin, peach and lime to make it pop. It's a pink dream with a sucker punch.
So it's a confrontational list, but a good one, built on interesting local liquors. Fearless bar leaders Stephen Kelly and David Smillie also make not knowing what you're about to drink OK. If you're still in a panic reaching for something familiar, a dozen craft brews run the gamut from Feral IPAs to light gose brews (salty beer du jour). Perrier Jouet at $20 a glass is a decent price.
The real pull, if you're a drinker who values a balanced diet, is the ability to summon food from Mr Kwok. Baskets of fluffy mushroom and spinach buns, xiao long bao (the soup dumplings Melbourne can't stop fizzing over) and bowls of prawns rumbled in sweet chilli jam and flash fried for a caramel finish get the job done.
It's the full service package for consenting adults.
Eat this ... Prawns rolled in chilli jam and flash fried
Drink this ... "Sloe, peach, lime, chickpea". Trust us
Know this ... The Goldilocks rooftop lives. Head upstairs when the sun shines
Say this ... Hit me