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To visit The Waratah and not order cocktails would be like eating a meat pie without the sauce. Like watching West Side Story with the sound off or a Baz Luhrmann film in black and white. There’s every chance you’d still have a perfectly fine time, but you’d be missing out on a lot of the fun, which is The Waratah’s reason to exist. You’d be missing out on drinks like a deliciously sharp Mai Tai ($23), starring passionfruit, rum and house-made cherry-pit liqueur.

Business partners Evan Stroeve and Cynthia Litster opened The Waratah, opposite Darlinghurst’s old Green Park Hotel (RIP), in December. Roughly 120 seats are squeezed into two levels, with a dining room and terrace upstairs and a walk-in bar with outdoor seating on the ground.

Top to bottom, it’s an attractive place, sporting jade-green tiles, native flowers (in both mural and fresh form), warm lights and soft timber. In short, it’s the smart neighbourhood boozer this neck of the neighbourhood needed.

You may have experienced Stroeve’s seasonal produce-championing cocktails when he was general manager at Circular Quay’s Bulletin Place, arguably the best bar in Sydney for most of its nine-year run. Bulletin Place’s drink specials would be overhauled on a weekly basis, and The Waratah’s street-level bar works to a similar program.

This is terrific for giving creative bartenders a chance to try new ideas, but it also means you’ve already missed out on the refreshing whisky and apple highball ($18) I enjoyed two weeks ago. It might have been the first highball ever infused with yarrow, too, the ancient Greeks’ favourite bitter medicinal herb. Achilles would have been right into it.

If you’re going to spend $24 on a drink, I say make it the kind of cocktail you’re going to remember.

In the (rather loud and somewhat squishy) upstairs dining room, however, the cocktail list will only change with each new calendar season. Stroeve is currently showcasing ingredients from the Daintree rainforest and it’s been a long time since I’ve sipped on anything as compelling as the Cacao & Cherry ($24). Essentially, a negroni twist featuring dry gin, Campari-macerated cherries and an inky-sweet lambrusco fortified with distilled chocolate, it finishes what the Black Forest Cake started.

Then there’s the balanced-but-thumping Coffee & Honey ($24), where Atherton Tablelands coffee is teamed with Australian whisky, Kangaroo Island honey, kombu and cacao husk. End-of-meal drinks don’t get much better, especially when there’s a vanilla flan ($16) in play, sticky with an amaro caramel enhanced by Wollombi Valley-grown citrus hybrid poor man’s orange.

Chef Lewin White helms the kitchen, and the mid-sized restaurant menu isn’t short on native ingredients and nostalgia. Lemon-myrtle butter glosses butterflied prawns (two for $30); rock oysters ($7 each) are splashed with rosella mignonette; fairy bread inspires the ice-cream sandwich ($14).

Continuing their push from fish-and-chip shops into the big league, thick-cut potato scallops (three for $18) are seasoned overnight in a fermented koji marinade to be battered and fried and topped with diced scallop (the seafood kind). I’ve seen the scallop-on-scallop trick employed at other restaurants but to better effect. The Waratah’s version has flavour to spare, but the batter on my visit was a little overworked, more Pluto Pup-thick than crisp and craggy.

Ulladulla-caught albacore tuna ($28) is a slicker way to snack, served raw and sharpened with pickled rose petals that don’t overwhelm. House-made crisps are provided for scooping.

Smoked-pork cheek skewers (two for $17) are supernaturally soft and dialled up with bunya nut miso, while wagyu rump cap ($55) is beautifully rested and charred, accompanied by an extra-savoury rendition of diane sauce. (This is going to be diane’s year, I can feel it.)

Juicy, bronze-skinned chicken ($38) is cooked Tuscan-style under a brick and scattered with a crunch of saltbush leaves. Top marks for the chook’s sticky, not-too-sweet honey gravy, although the menu could do with another starchy side to soak it up. There are only $12 fries dusted with something called “bush salt”.

Is The Waratah essential eating? Not quite, but it’s a good bit of fun with the right intentions, and I look forward to seeing how the menu evolves.

Is it essential drinking? Absolutely. It’s also worth noting that the front bar is dog-friendly, offers a towering “burger with the lot” and all classics are shaken or stirred to the highest level.

Cocktail prices have skyrocketed over the past few years, so if you’re going to spend $24 on a drink, I say make it the kind of drink you’re going to remember.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine