Billed as “otherworldly terrain”, Pleasure Club in Newtown is a crazy cauldron of a basement bar with live entertainment and a line-up of nostalgic cocktails shaken into the small hours.
Combine The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Where the Wild Things Are and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and a nostalgic school-recess fever dream and you should get a picture of Pleasure Club. Dreamed up by the wild and wandering mind of Odd Culture creative director Nick Zavadszky along with entertainment manager Sabrina Medcalf, the venue invites you into what they call their “otherworldly terrain”. Practically, that means a basement bar underneath Newtown stalwart Thai Pothong. Ethereally, it means you might walk into a DJ spinning Blondie and Leonard Cohen one night, or a Frankenstein princess singing cabaret another.
It can all feel a bit theatre-kids-gone-wild on occasion (they should have a steady stream of those on tap from the performing arts school about a block away), but it’s also delightfully refreshing to see a venue push a few boundaries that very much needed to be pushed. Pleasant pastel furnishings and neat little flower arrangements? Leave those for the daytime dwellers. Here, everything is a dark dreamscape – libertine and louche.
The main cocktail list is a collaboration between Odd Culture’s Sam Kirk and Matt Whiley, the latter best known for his Redfern waste-not bar Re. The idea is nostalgia, but slightly nuts. So, you’ll find a Chicken Parm (“stained beer-soaked carpet optional” the menu quips), which contains a brave combination of vodka, chicken salt, breadcrumbs, tomato and Comté cheese. The unapologetically eucalypt-flavoured Cough Drops drifts you right back to the times you were able to convince your mum to let you stay home from school. The Vegemite is a somewhat confronting facsimile of Australia’s favourite yeast spread, augmented with vodka and Lillet apéritif. Perhaps the two most successful are the Passion Pop (named for the first drink most 18-year-olds could scrabble together enough money to buy from their after-school job) and the Cherry Ripe, which adds a ripple of Davidson’s plum to coconut, cherry and rum.
There’s also a strong by-the-glass wine list that mixes low-fi Australian drops (a shiraz-chardonnay mash-up from Whip, or the Out of My Head Grenache from Ochota Barrels, both from South Australia) with surprisingly traditional entries such as the pride of Canberra, Clonakilla Riesling and Tyrrell’s Vat 1 Semillon. The alcohol avoidant are well looked after, with several of the signature cocktails offered alcohol-free, along with Heaps Normal Quiet XPA.
