From the brains behind Frog’s Hollow and Alice comes another distinctive CBD boozer.
Rituals and execution. Peter Hollands will talk in detail about it.
“Rituals that people can engage with,” he says. “So things like the beer crates: when one runs out and we fill a new one, we’re going to carry it around the room and offer people more beers. Or the citrus press to make our own citrus water.”
These are the rituals at Shaman, Hollands’ long-awaited bar slotted beneath the old Metro Arts building at 109 Edward Street. But, he says, they’re not meant to be burdensome.
Hollands already has a knack for this with other bars he co-owns. At Frog’s Hollow Saloon on Charlotte Street, it’s honky-tonk. At Alice, just off Elizabeth, it’s ’80s rock and pop culture. At the Alliance in Spring Hill, it’s Queensland cultural throwbacks. At all of them, though, it’s never overbearing or constrictive.
“There’s nothing to make your experience more onerous,” he says. “The themes don’t get in the way of just coming in and having a drink. If you want to engage, you can. And then the theme can be really unique because it’s not forcing anyone into a pigeonhole.”
The theme at Shaman is rum and tequila – there’s about 150 of them combined on the back bar – with a little bit of Carlos Santana thrown in for good measure.
Hollands was intending to open the bar in late July but approvals pushed the process back and meant he wound up doing much of the build himself.
“I’ve burned myself out but I got the result I wanted,” he says. “It’s exactly what I envisioned.”
The bar occupies a basement space beneath the heritage-listed building. You enter down the old carriageway on the left of the building before descending downstairs and entering through a heavy timber door.
Inside, the building’s heavy original timber beams frame an intimate space with a semi-octagonal bar on one side of the venue and matching low-set octagonal tables on the other. Sealed original archways feature a variety of framed photography, the space lit by vintage petal lights (there’s also a framed, signed copy of Santana’s album Abraxas, which kicked off the original idea for the bar).
It takes a moment to realise it’s a deceptively simple fit-out, the detail in the precisely set lighting and Santana-esque (in the broadest possible sense) music selection.
Your eyes tend to be drawn the bar, where seasoned vets Tim Pope (ex-Par Bar in Melbourne) and Ed Quatermass (Maker, Death & Taxes et al) are in charge of a tight drinks list that features three house-takes on the staples – a daiquiri, a margarita prepped with house-made triple sec, and an old-fashioned; a rotating list of old-school, more obscure classics; and a third section that’s designed to celebrate forgotten retro gems (a bracing pina colada currently features).
There’s a short list of mostly South American wines, and just one beer, Estrella, bottles of which sit iced up behind the bar in the afore mentioned crates.
Drinks are served either over the bar or at the table – it’s your choice.
“There’s no structure that forces anyone to do anything they don’t want to do,” Hollands says. “There’s no [venue] police telling you, you need to be seated. We have table service, but we’ll just come over if you haven’t already approached the bar.
“The vibe, the vision – the look, the feel – we have to maintain. That’s the brand. But our offering we can be dynamic. We’re always ready to try to be flexible and give people what they want.”
Open daily 3pm-12am
109 Edward Street, Brisbane
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
