Everleigh cocktail bar team to open Heartbreaker

What do you get when you take the city's most talented bar minds and install them in a city bar with a jukebox, craft beers, hard liquor, a 3am licence and a pool table? One answer is gout, and it mightn't be wrong. The other would be Heartbreaker, a new bar by the team who brought you the Everleigh – the golden era cocktail bar that is this newbie's polar opposite - and Sebastian Reaburn, adviser to Lui Bar and 1806.

The Everleigh has dominated Australia's best cocktail bar lists since it opened four years ago. With its launch, owner Michael Madrusan, late of New York's Milk and Honey (RIP) and the equally excellent offshoot Little Branch, ushered in a new era for cocktails in Melbourne. The drinks were and remain a benchmark for pitch perfect classics, built on four ingredients or less and pure, hand-cut ice, which Madrusan now sells through a secondary company, Navy Strength Ice Co.

If there's one complaint Melbourne could level against the Fitzroy cocktail bar, it would for its dedication to decorum. Heartbreaker answers that complaint.

Due to open in the first week of August on the old Mai Tai site in the city, it's somewhat LA dive-y in concept, though they're quick to clarify they don't posess the requisite grit, dirt, or age. They're pitching it instead as a good times bar where the booths are big, the jukebox rules, and the mescal and tequila flows free.

This is an idea Madrusan has been waiting to drop from the start. The drinks focus remains tight. Cocktails will be limited to the Everleigh's four bottled classics (a martini, and manhattan among them), with the main action being on the craft beer taps and high quality spirits including a strong whisky collection and left-of-centre tequilas and mescals to echo the bars of LA. Food is in the works, still to be confirmed, but more in line with the sort of greasy stuff you would pair with a beer and bad decisions rather than the charcuterie of the cocktail bar.

Stay tuned.