This levelled-up neighbourhood bar with a sunny disposition is all about Aussie drinks and vegetarian food, with bite delivered by a close-knit team primed for good times.
When Daniel McBride and Dynn Smulewicz first opened Golden Gully on Leichhardt’s Norton Street in 2019, not only did they bring the inner-west suburb its first small bar, they did it with a commitment to local produce and vegetarian cooking that immediately made this neighbourhood haunt a destination for visitors from a much wider radius. When we say “local produce”, though, we’re not talking farmers’ markets and backyard chooks. Rather, the Gully offers an all-Australian drinks list, taking advantage of the booming craft-spirits movement to build cocktails with ingredients exclusively from our shores, and backs it up with wines and beers chosen with the same values in mind. That might see you enjoying an Aussie Negroni made with Brookie’s gin from Byron and a house blend of local vermouths and Italian-style bittersweet liqueurs, or clutching a cold tin of Stomping Ground raspberry sour beer from Melbourne, or perhaps swirling a glass of skin-contact riesling from one of the Adelaide Hills’ new-wave winemakers.
To go with the drinks, the Gully has an all-vegetarian menu of snacks and shared plates – a roll-call of dishes that hit hard in the flavour stakes, and just happen to be meat-free. Both these are drawcards, of course, but the reason people keep coming back is just as much down to those serving the line-up and just how good it feels to sit here as what’s being served. As they say, “It’s always sunny at the Gully.”
