First look: Subterranean, bourbon-fuelled Alice is one of 2023’s best bar openings
Beyond a neon sign in a CBD laneway there’s a back bar stocked with 150 bourbons, a jukebox playing ’80s tunes, and vintage TVs broadcasting Cuban baseball games.
Peter Hollands reckons his new bar will be divisive. He almost wants his new bar to be divisive.
“I talk to my mum about ideas and she says, ‘I wouldn’t really go for that, but then I’m not your demographic.’” Hollands says. “I’m like, ‘Everyone’s my demographic if they want to come and drink in a rock’n’roll boozer.’”
And Alice is a proper rock’n’roll boozer. Those who head along to tonight’s opening service will find this subterranean bourbon bolthole hidden down a blackened laneway opposite the Hilton Hotel on Elizabeth Street.
Look for the neon red “Alice” signage, walk down a short flight of stairs, and you’re in a bar fitted out in dark timber. There’s an enormous bar with permanent seating down one side of the room, a line of booths down the other.
In one corner is a Rowe Ami 100-CD jukebox Hollands sourced from country Victoria; in another is a pool table he inherited from a neighbouring venue. Behind the bar, sitting high, are a couple of vintage televisions on which Hollands is intending to play old NRL and Cuban baseball games, and episodes of Knight Rider.
Hanging throughout the venue are colour-adjustable metal pendent lights. Hollands’ favourite hue is a deep red, which gives Alice an edgy, salacious vibe.
If this all sounds very specific, it’s because Hollands had some specific venues for inspiration: Heartbreaker in Melbourne, Earl’s Juke Joint and Frankie’s Pizza in Sydney, and Cry Baby and Shotgun Willie’s in Adelaide. It’s the kind of thing that hasn’t quite been done before in Brisbane — not in the CBD, at least.
There’s a chance you mightn’t get what Hollands is going for. If not, he says, you can head a couple of blocks over to Frog’s Hollow, the saloon-style bar Hollands co-owns with Nick Winter and David Robinson.
For drinks at Alice, a bourbon-focused back bar runs to about 150 bottles of the brown stuff. There’s also a clutch of gins, rums and Scotch whiskies, and a single vodka.
The booze is being measured into a tight selection of signature cocktails that includes a Roku gin-based concoction, a Johnnie Walker Black-driven number, and a Patron Reposado-peddling Stiff Upper Lip. There’s also a “lucky sip” Old Fashioned made with either Maker’s 46, Knob Creek, Baker’s or Basil Hayden’s bourbon.
There are also eight beer taps that will rotate through local craft breweries, although Hollands says the bar will always pour Guinness and XXXX Gold.
And that’s more or less the formula. There’s no food and little in the way of formality — just fast-paced drinks ordered at the bar over a booming soundtrack of 1980s music, until 3am, seven days a week.
“The city is more of a destination than it used to be,” Hollands says. “You see it on a Saturday night at Frog’s, particularly over the past eight months.
“Queen’s Wharf is coming and then there’s Howard Smith Wharves at the other end of the city, and people will be walking between those two precincts. Queen’s Wharf will add a stack of restaurants, and all those diners have got to go somewhere. So it’s definitely becoming more and more of a destination.”
Open Daily 5pm-3am.
195 Elizabeth Street, Brisbane.