Honey Bar

If you didn’t know any different, you would assume Honey Bar was simply the latest incarnation of a pre-existing pub. With its corner location on Clarendon Street and its timber, render and concrete-bedecked, L-shaped main room complete with L-shaped bar, it certainly looks and feels like a poked and primped local boozer.

But Honey actually inhabits a brand new, purpose-built building. Which may beg the question: if you have the opportunity to create a bar with a completely clean slate, why simply reconstruct a model that’s been around since Adam was a pup?

One reason may be that, as Honey Bar proves, the pub model is a pretty successful one, particularly when you can start from scratch and give it a sense of light and space that many old-time boozers would kill for.

Honey further exploits this airiness with its warm colours — from the timber-panelled ceiling and bar to mustard-coloured banquettes, pastel chalky wall murals and oversized light shades that bathe the whole scene in a friendly and, well, honey-coloured light that nobody who has ever looked in a mirror and winced could complain about.

So far, so good. But Honey’s youthfulness also comes across in the experience it offers. It may look all dressed up, mature and demographically tolerant but the attitude, the music and the victuals it dishes up seem skewed towards a younger crowd.

It’s not just the always-disturbing appearance of Red Bull as a cocktail ingredient or the fact that a glass of 2008 Heathcote Cravens Place Shiraz ($8.50) was sloshed together from a couple of near-empty bottles but that the service can be careless, distracted, even snooty.

Given Honey’s obvious desire to be the kind of bar that locals treat as a second lounge room (good range of beer on tap — from Carlton to Tiger; a reasonably priced, mostly Aussie, wine list; bar food that includes a pretty good beef burger, $15.50), the attitude is a little bewildering. It also feels out of place given the welcoming nature of the architecture and design.

Perhaps it was the 21st party being held upstairs that was the distraction. Or perhaps it’s just growing pains. Whatever the reason, Honey certainly has good bar bones but feels as if it is yet to fully grow into them.