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If ever a restaurant was going to open a hard-to-find bar, you’d think it would be Enter Via Laundry. After all, this regional Indian dining experience has specialised in secrets since it launched. In 2018, self-taught chef Helly Raichura turned her Box Hill South lounge room into a Saturday supper club for 10 diners, who passed the washing machine on arrival.

Then, as now, the project was to showcase lesser known Indian food and Australian native flavours in an intimate setting. Understandably, the address of this domestic pop-up was kept quiet.

In 2021, the concept moved to Monbulk in the Dandenong Ranges and the address was only revealed upon booking. The following year, Enter Via Laundry found a permanent location in Carlton North but there was no signage and the entrance was hidden down a rear laneway. Again, the exact location was divulged after making a reservation.

Oh, how things have changed. Now the address is on the website and – shock, horror – there’s a sign at the front door. Behind that entryway is the new bar, a casual adjunct to the 18-seat restaurant at rear.

In a city that loves its secret watering holes, and from a business that has coveted mystery, this is the most scream-it-from-the-rooftops move Enter Via Laundry could have made. That’s fine: there are things worth shouting about.

Sit at the counter and look upon a photo gallery that tells the Enter Via Laundry story, or nestle in the lounge area. Either way, you’re here for cosy conversation in an intimate salon; the exuberance is saved for the food and drinks.

Leading Melbourne bar guy Tom McHugh (Caretakers Cottage) has designed the cocktails, which riff on classic drinks with Indian and native flavours. I love them.

There’s a dangerously easy-to-drink lassi with mango gin, lemon myrtle syrup and yoghurt foam. The house spritz reads as an upcycled sugarcane juice, with ginger, rum and jasmine tea. The wintry winner is an Old Fashioned with cardamom whisky and a theatrical infusion of smoking paperbark.

Bar snacks include beloved dishes from Enter Via Laundry’s main menus that have had their day in the restaurant but deserve a longer life. Some have transferred unchanged, such as the patra poda, prawn marinated with coconut and mustard and wrapped in a nasturtium leaf before grilling.

Others have been simplified. A dainty crumbed quail egg from a previous Mughlai-focused menu is now a chicken egg wrapped in spiced chicken mince, crumbed, fried and served with spicy onions in a raunchy riot of flavours.

Some dishes are nostalgic street food riffs. Bataka na bhajiya sees sliced potatoes coated in chickpea flour batter, crisp-fried, and served with pineapple ketchup. They are my new favourite chip and a good reason to visit Enter Via The Very Normal Door.