From the décor, to the cocktails, to the glassware itself, co-owners Jared Merlino, Michael Hwang and Eddie Levy, and bar manager Andres Walters have thought of everything to transport you to 1944.
French doors welcome you to an elegant bar with American wartime posters framed along the walls. A strong focus on rye whisky is evident in the expansive back bar, inspired by the Rum and Rye Old Fashioned cocktail created at Lobo and the history shared by Australia and America.
Walters explained, “I think Australia and America have such a lot in common with rum, where we used rum as a currency when we first established ourselves in our early days, and so did America. So when there was a British blockade on ports to America, it slowed the rum to America and that's when they started to make rye whisky. We are actually only now seeing the resurgence of rye today.”
The attention to detail continues to impress with the signature glassware created specifically for the Kittyhawk venue. The team wanted very unique vessels to serve their cocktails in, true to Kittyhawk’s style. All shots will be served out of a custom shot glass made to look like the casing of a bullet at it’s base, a creative take on a gunshot and a playful way for patrons to experience the theme of the era.
If the well thought-out and incredibly detailed theme of Kittyhawk wasn’t impressive enough, the ethos of sustainable cocktails and reducing the bar’s imprint is a huge point of difference. Upon realising the amount of waste that occurs in bars, the team at Kittyhawk decided to go a different route.
"For instance, when we juice our lemons we keep the excess of the lemons and vacuum pack them with brown sugar, which creates an oleo saccharum," Walters shared. "We then create a lemon butter utilising the peels that we take from our oleo saccharum and the flesh from any other peels from the bar and cook down the flesh with some sugar syrup and some butter. So we work in a way that we can re-use and maximise our ingredients to reduce our imprint. We are trying to create a cocktail menu that is using its ingredients to their utmost capacity.”
It took a lot of time for the team at Kittyhawk to reveal the venue - the original opening date was set for April this year. However, after seeing what they have come up with, it was worth the wait.
Kittyhawk is open seven days a week, located 16 Phillip Lane, Sydney.
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