‘Debaucherous’: Bentley Group open David Lynch-inspired bar with Chartreuse slushies

Descend the stairs to Vespertine and you’re met with a vast, cavernous basement bathed in glowing red light. There’s plush velvet banquettes, soft drapes and neon-lit spaces that change colour from pink to purple to blue. It’s like walking into a David Lynch movie.

For their latest venue and first-ever bar, Brent Savage and Nick Hildebrandt, the duo behind the Bentley Group (Eleven Barrack, King Clarence and Waterman’s) wanted to create a space that was unlike anywhere else in Sydney.

“We didn’t want it to be a classic old man bar, filled with timber and antiques and all that,” says Hildebrandt. “We want it to be fun and loud, and debaucherous and crazy.”

The pair worked with longtime collaborator Pascale Gomes-McNabb on the interiors, which looked to the surrealist films of Lynch and his Paris bar Silencio for inspiration. “I wanted to create an almost cinematic unfolding of spaces – a visual and tactile otherworld,” says Gomes-McNabb.

It starts with a glowing red Vespertine sign on George Street, which leads down to the basement of a heritage sandstone building on the corner of Angel Place. The venue sits back-to-back with Ashe, Bentley Group’s new South-East Asian grill, which opened earlier this month.

It’s the kind of place Savage and Hildebrandt would like to go for a drink themselves. Savage says he’d order the La Morena, a nutty, nougat-flavoured cocktail made with tequila and walnut amaro, while Hildebrant would gravitate towards the Chartreuse slushie, with tarragon syrup, apple and lime.

For anyone who doesn’t want to wait, three cocktails are kept on tap, including a blood orange Americano and key lime margarita (the latter made on the same tart, tropical citrus used in Eleven Barrack’s key lime and coconut curd pie).

The cocktails are great, but so is the wine, says Hildebrandt. “It’s a bar where you can go and drink an incredible bottle of champagne or Burgundy or a great old Australian red,” he says. “And at the same time, you can also have a $15 glass of wine.”

It’s a similar story for food, which ranges from caviar service and oysters to casual bar snacks. King Clarence and Ashe chef Khanh Nguyen has reworked familiar favourites such as prawn toast and banh mi.

The fried chicken sandwich is stacked with French onion jam and melty gruyere cheese; pâté en croute is filled with Vietnamese pork loaf and wrapped in buttery shortcrust pastry; sourdough prawn toast comes piled with a chiffonade of cos lettuce, smoked bacon and caesar salad dressing.

The lighting, which feels one of the most striking part of the venue’s design, is the work of lighting specialist Siobhan McNabb, who used LEDs to illuminate the building’s heritage features, tracing the curves of the room’s arched vaults, and highlighting the texture of the original chipped brick.

Glow also comes from a trio of ephemeral artworks, hand-sculptured glass neon red lights, shaped like squiggly lines which dangle over the bar, their gentle curves echoing the sound waves coming from the performance stage at the front of the room.

The platform is flanked by two custom Martin Audio speakers, with 40 more speakers scattered throughout the room. “It’s one of the best sound systems that you’ll find in a bar in Sydney,” says Hildebrandt. Live acts range from improv jazz groups to a DJ spinning funk and neo-soul, with music every night of the week.

There’s no cover charge for the live music, no bookings for the bar, and while there are plenty of cosy, semi-private areas, you can’t reserve them. It was important to Savage that Vespertine didn’t feel like an exclusive space. “It’s a bar for everybody, somewhere you can feel like you can go after work or for a night out.”