It feels like nothing is off limits at DEADBEAT. Want to leave your mark and graffiti the wall? They’ll hand you the marker to do it. Want to swap the ornate mirror that’s been floating around your house for years for a negroni? They’ll find the perfect place to display your treasure while you sip your cocktail.
“I’d love it if someone got married down here on a whim,” says operations manager Adi Ruiz. “We'll do that.”
Image credit: DEADBEAT | Supplied
It’s the counter-culture cocktail-slash-dive bar just opened in Perth’s CBD, but the space is a much higher achiever than its name might suggest. Here, you’ll get high technique cocktails served in a late-night, dingy dive bar format. It’s an incongruous, yet compelling concept.
“I love dive bars,” Adi tells me. “Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, there are such epic dive bars there, and they're so good and they're so dingy and there’s so little effort put into them.”
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It’s an ethos that feels a little at odds with his background of high-end, polished bartending, but it’s Adi’s homage to great dive bars, and in particular to Sydney’s one-time rock n’ roll bar icon, Frankie’s Pizza, his favourite bar of all time.
“I used to go after work all the time and it was so much fun, really kind of dirty, but also a little bit of polish as well. We want this place to feel super divey and super trashy, but there has to be, for me, a lot of counterpoints of polish that are just sprinkled through it as well.”
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Right now, it’s got the bones of a great classic dive bar - red leather banquettes, low-slung velvet armchairs, some glam-rock zebra print, neon signs, refracted lighting from a low hung mirror ball, and a Harley Davidson mural - the one wall they’ll ask you not to write on. But the space is made to evolve, and for guests to leave their impression. This is a starting point, Adi tells me, but give it a few months.
“Once people have come in and said look at my giant plastic marlin that I brought in, can I have some drinks for this? And I'll be like, fuck, yes, you can. We'll hang that straight up.”
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That grungy dive bar front is an exceptional cover for the work going on behind the scenes to produce some truly excellent cocktails. It’s an intentional choice, to allow guests to enjoy the experience, while the intricacies remain behind the curtain.
“We're gonna work really hard in the background, but it's completely anti-flex. It has to be thought provoking and it has to be expressed on the page really simply, and keep the curtain drawn with all of the technique and all of the wanky cold press this and sous vide that and the gastrique and all the other bits and pieces that we do play with.”
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At its heart, DEADBEAT is about undeniably delicious drinks, with plenty of room for creativity. It’s about classic, known combinations, flipped on their heads.
“The Negroni Spider is the beginning of that thinking. It's very simple. It's pretty easy. It's kind of silly and over the top, but it's playful in a way that the Negroni isn't. You don't know where to take your mind, because the spider is such a nostalgic, youthful, evocative thing, and you throw it at one of the most serious, classic cocktails and it sort of breaks your brain apart a little bit.”
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Plus, with the Pirate Life precinct just upstairs, the bar is fitted out with taps pouring their neighbours craft brews.
And while DEADBEAT is a cocktail bar first, there’s also a short menu of late night snacks. Think spiced popcorn, jalapeno and bacon loaded tater tots, and some seriously cheesy toasties including an epic bechamel and caramelised onion offering.
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“We're not sure if we're going to get to the point where we park a chef down here and have a proper chef driven kind of menu. I'm not sure if that honors the spirit of a dive bar,” says Adi. “I just want to make sure that everything's always really super tasty and really approachable.”
Adi’s last venue, Bulletin Place, scored a coveted spot on the World’s 50 Best Bars list five times, and he’s bringing plenty of those learnings to DEADBEAT.
“A lot of what I do is informed by what I don't want to happen as much as what I do want to happen as well. So I've got a list of shit I hate in bars and in service and in bartenders that you won't find in here. It’s a distillation of everything that we love minus everything that we can't stand. And hopefully without ever, ever seeing what that list is, you just come in and you feel it and you're affected by it.”
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As for what it takes to be a Top 50 bar, according to Adi?
“Just those little bits and pieces. It's just a million tiny little one percenter things that as a customer you walk in there and you don't even know know what's happening to you, you just know that the sound is right, the temperature's right, the playlist is sick, the chairs are comfortable, the drinks are unparalleled, and the people that are serving you're really familiar and how good do we feel right now?”
The Details
What: DEADBEAT
Where: 440 Murray Street, Perth 6000
When: Wednesday to Saturday, 4pm to late
For more information and to book, click here.
Main image credit: DEADBEAT | Supplied
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