Gimlet

Gimlet at Cavendish House is a restaurant and cocktail bar by chef Andrew McConnell at Russell Street and Flinders Lane in Melbourne.

It fills the ground floor of Cavendish House, a heritage building from the 1920s, and was McConnell's first new project in five years when it opened in 2020. He wrote the menu with head chef Allan Eccles, who came from Cutler & Co, another of McConnell's restaurants. The look borrows from the glamour of Chicago in the first half of the 20th century, and Eccles described the cooking as leaning on both Europe and America, mixing old-world dishes with a newer outlook.

A wood-fired oven stands at the center of the open kitchen. Dry-aged Muscovy duck breast comes out of it with Corella pear and liquorice, and a grass-fed tomahawk steak is cooked there too. Earlier menus began with escargot and with crab on toast topped with sea urchin, served flounder with the Basque garlic sauce pil-pil, and roasted potatoes with taleggio cheese, while gelato ended the meal. Caviar and champagne are part of the bistro's routine.

The Sydney design studio Acme fitted out the rooms with bars of black and gold marble, leather booths, geometric tiles and honeycomb chandeliers modeled on the work of the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Leather booths and high tables suit long family lunches as well as dinners for two, and a mezzanine for private dinners looks down on the main floor. Many of the cocktails are drawn from the Prohibition era, and head sommelier Anthony Pieri keeps a wine list of several hundred labels.