Barfly treats the real deal

The Mint Bar at Sage is a lovely place for a drink, but we are here for early eats, in the hope that a restaurant with this much determination to scale the heights of local dining will do something interesting in its bar food, too.

You walk through the bar to enter the restaurant, in this most gorgeous spot in the historic Gorman House. It is all shining lights and greenery, with a lovely restaurant set-up inside and out.

The bar area is small, shielded from the cold with plastic sheeting and a roof, and warmed by gas heaters. You sit on beer kegs at high and low tables, and order at the bar.

With Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli, Billie Holliday and some more random offerings on the playlist, it is all very atmospheric.

The first surprise, though, is the scaled-back wine list. Sage has an outstanding wine list, page upon page of well-sourced, properly explained wines, with a big focus on France, and welcome vertical listings of many wines.

In the Mint Bar, it is much less extensive, with five whites and four reds, all by the glass or bottle. They are cheaper wines, almost entirely $40 or less. There are a few locals - a couple of Ministry series reds from Capital Wines, a couple from Nick O'Leary and a Jeir Creek 2008 chardonnay.

The list is fine for a bar, and there is a good list of cocktails and beers, but if you are here for some drinking fun, you might want to ask for the astonishing restaurant list instead, and settle in. Whisky also features on it.

As for food, you order that at the bar, too. Not alien to appearing odd, we order the entire bar menu. The guys behind the bar take our unusual ordering style in their stride and we head back to our beer kegs, number and glasses of wine in hand: an Argentinian white, Quara Torrontes, ($10/$50), which is floral, assertive and entirely drinkable; and an OK bubbly, Frog Rock ($10, $35), to wait for the food.

The first dish is even odder than us. It is a plate of pickled vegetables ($9), like a little salad, but they have no sharpness and not much of a palate-cleansing crunch and freshness either. It contains radish, carrots, watermelon and slices of apricot, which feel out of place, and peppery rocket. The vegetables are kind of bland, like a mild sour pickle, and are not all that appealing.

The second snack is much more on the money. It is dates wrapped in bacon ($9) and held together by toothpicks, with about 10 on a plate.

They are nothing startling or sophisticated, but they are what you want with a drink - salty, strident, easy to eat, mess-free and tasty.

Our favourite snack is actually a little messy, but it is delicious and something we could just eat three or four times over and call it dinner. Short-rib crostini ($16) is a pile of meat hot with chilli, deliciously oily, perfectly fatty, shredded, meaty and intense, piled high on two big pieces of thin toast, crisp and good. Lovely.

Then comes the pizza. We ordered all four. Truth be told, we expected something extra-special of Sage's pizza, given that if we were eating on the inside, we would be getting astonishing attention to detail down to the hand-churned butter on handmade plate ware. But in the bar, they are aiming for a casual clientele and an excellent price point. The pizzas here cost only $15 ($13 for the mushroom), which is cheaper than at the local pub, and they are a lot better than the local pub's.

Sadly, it seems Sage uses bought bases. They are not bad bought bases, but they don't have that crisp, thin, random joy of a homemade pizza base.

Some of the toppings are imaginative. A pizza with brie, apricots, honeyed walnuts and tarragon is unusual, and rather sweet with the honey and fruit. Another with salami, red onion, cucumber and mint is heavy with the cured meat, but favoured by some among us.

A pizza with a topping of smoked salmon, capers and mascarpone uses a superior salmon, thickly sliced and rather piled on. This writer's favourite is one with a topping of mushrooms, feta and caramelised onion that is in familiar territory.

We are on to the restaurant wine list by this time and liking what we find there. If we had taken things a bit more slowly on the food front and concentrated more seriously on the drinking, we could be chomping a bit here, drinking a bit there, enjoying parts of the soundtrack, the warmth and the dying light, and feeling happily pleased that Canberra has corners such as this, away from the chrome and glass town centres, with nooks of greenery, prettiness and escape.

So we dropped by the Mint Bar for early, easy dinner, but leave thinking that the restaurant wine list and the lovely setting would be the motive for coming here. If you get hungry while slouching on the keg over a drink, grab a pizza or simply order a line-up of excellent short-rib crostini.

Mint Bar at Sage

Address: Gorman House, 10 Batman Street, Braddon

Phone: 6249 6050

Website: sagerestaurant.net.au

Owners: Peter and Michael Harrington

Chef: Nicolai Lipscomb

Hours: Tuesday to Friday from 4pm, Saturday from noon

Licensed: Yes, no BYO

Vegetarian: Limited

Wheelchair access: Yes, including disabled toilets

To pay: American Express, Mastercard, Visa, eftpos

Seats: Up to 80, all outside

Summary: A lovely location for a bar, where food is a focus in summer and a bit of an afterthought in other seasons.

Food ★★

Wine list ★★

Service ★★

Style ★★★

Value for money ★★

>> Kirsten Lawson is a staff writer.