Restaurant review: Bar Liberty, Fitzroy
This small, urban, stylish diner is driven by a love of progressive wine and no-nonsense culinary talents.
Restaurant people are always talking about opening a place where they themselves would want to eat and drink on a day off.
A place serving the dishes and beverages they’d seek out when not dealing with the rest of us. All I can say is that most of the time, we seem to have different tastes. Then one Monday night you find yourself sitting in Bar Liberty, and, suddenly, the cliche becomes real.
Bar Liberty is exactly the kind of place operators Banjo Harris Plane and Casey Wall — one a noted wine wonk, the other an ambitious chef — wanted for themselves. It just so happens a lot of us are sharing the love, too.
This is a place serving just the kind of eclectic, flavour-ridden dishes that ring my bells, swerving from Canton to Campania in one frantic U-turn. And Harris Plane’s extensive wine list is a fascinating snapshot of modern winemaking from around the world, but dammit if he didn’t recommend and serve some cracking vino with a whiff of Natural Fairy Dust but a full olfactory whack of quality.
The Pitch: Small, urban, stylish but clearly done on a tight budget, you cannot take the “Bar” out of Bar Liberty. It’s very much driven by HP’s love of wine and being tapped in to what’s happening at the progressive edge of winemaking. The guy’s a former fancy restaurant sommelier; his job is to read customers and make them happy. And in North Carolina native Casey Wall (Rockwell & Sons) the wine man has his culinary muse. Getting away from the southern US theme of his other restaurant, Liberty allows Wall latitude to explore the breadth of his no-nonsense talents.
The reality: If this is where they’d wanna be on a day off, I’m very happy for an invitation. For starters, someone has hacked my Spotify playlist of great musical moments, and it took reserve not to stand and play air bass a la Peter Hook of New Order. Warmth, conviviality and professionalism are thick in the air. And how else would I ever have discovered La Violetta’s Das Sakrileg riesling, from various WA sites, and been so happy with what is, apparently, a very low-intervention wine.
The cuisine: Everything and anything, as long as it works. A bit of fermentation, a subtle exploitation of bitter/sour/tannic flavours. But mostly just delicious stuff. Pasta. Pippies in XO with savoury doughnuts (so hot right now). Steak, jus and horseradish. It’s a tight, generous menu: food that works with booze, offered up in four key categories: snacks, medium, large and vegetables.
Highlights: Liberty is a succession of highlights: Those pippies in XO “nicked from The Flower Drum”. Vibrant, nuanced, fun. A 45-day dry-aged sirloin with lemon and fresh horseradish is toothsome, on the bone, thickly sliced into juicy slabs. Particularly alongside the charred summer squash with chicken jus, sorrel and bottarga, a warm salad of fresh, chary vegetables lifted with an unctuous jus. And as a snack, salt and pepper vegetables are the perfect way to get a wine-drinking meal started, as is the bucatini cacio e pepe, a glorious jumble of thick, cheesy, peppery noodles, properly al dente.
Lowlights: Being a bar, the nice little timber tables are a bit squeezy. Some might find it a bit noisy too (not me, obviously).
Will I need a food dictionary? No, just ask your waiter.
The damage: Very fair indeed. And while wine prices are fair, there’s no cheap booze here, either. Liberty is all about quality.
In summary: I’ll have what they’re having.
Bar Liberty, Fitzroy
Address: 234 Johnston Street, Fitzroy, barliberty.com | Phone: N/A (bookings at web site only) | Hours: lunch Sunday; dinner daily | Score: 4.5 out of 5