I can’t confirm or deny all the stories, but I was around for enough of them to say that a lot of them, particularly the better ones, are true. Heston Blumenthal getting behind the decks, say, or Massimo Bottura offering to comp a young woman dinner at Osteria Francescana because he liked the way she danced on the bar. (For the record, the first album Heston pulled from the crate was The Specials – go figure – and Massimo honoured his promise to the bar dancer when she showed up in Italy many years later clutching the ad hoc voucher he’d written out on – what else? – a Gerald’s Bar napkin.)
It was at Gerald’s Bar that Enrique Olvera, don of Mexico City chefs, showed me how to clap like a Mexican. It was here that I followed David Chang’s gaze over my shoulder one night to see him staring at one of his chefs from New York trying hula hoop on the median strip. Only this March, the crew from St John in London took over the bar one Sunday afternoon, pouring the wines and roasting the bones, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I don’t want to oversell the famous-people-drink-here part of the conversation, though, because they are the icing and not the cake, the footnotes and not the story. Gerald’s Bar might have become an essential stop for any food person visiting Melbourne (and that goes double for wine folk) but it’s a bar of the people in essence and that remains its strength. It’s a bar that feels welcoming and familiar, even if it’s the first time you’ve walked through the door. It’s one of the great locals, even if you’re not remotely local.
This is not an accident. The bar is the result of a lifetime of work from Gerald himself. Gerald Diffey left his native Kent and made his way to Australia in classic Gerald form, the long way – overland. He then worked his way across all the compass points of Melbourne hospitality – artisan baking, specialty coffee, a laneway nightclub, fine dining, an upmarket pub. A career crisis of sorts led to a self-imposed exile in the countryside, and this bar was his way of putting it all back together.
Back when the bar opened in 2006, Gerald lived upstairs and did it all, writing the menu, pouring the drinks, cooking the food, flipping the vinyl from an impeccable private collection. Wines by the glass were whatever was ordered first or whatever the bar (read: Gerald) felt like drinking, which kept things ever fresh, and the shelves were covered with treasures collected over a lifetime.
Mario Di Ienno and Gerald Diffey mid-service (photo courtesy of Gerald’s Bar)
The eyes of a vast Michael Caine stared out, like a Cockney TJ Eckleburg, from his David Bailey portrait on the wall across a narrow shopfront taking in bullfight posters, an absinthe fountain and a particularly good Michelin Man. A herd of figurine gazelles grazed by the window, just above a diagram of a Bren gun. The swing doors to the bathrooms read “rest station”. The sublime peculiarity is not just for show; I recall seeing a box in the kitchen labelled “THINGS” stacked upon another tagged “MORE THINGS”, while just the other day I picked up a hand-lettered bitters bottle from the bar to find it was the “sad, sad tears of a clown”.
Here’s Gerald himself on the how and the why of the bar’s signature net curtains: “The white fabric diffuses the sunlight and gives an incandescent glow to the faces of the guests. The ruching is important. I spend a little time getting the pleats to fall evenly. No flat spots that look like patterned wallpaper. No tight bunches like a schoolboy’s over-knotted tie,” he writes in his memoir, Beggars Belief. “Just cascading ripples, like a distant waterfall, soft shimmering pleats of lace a little like petticoats in the breeze, bobbing on the elastic wire.”
The ruching is important. Gerald’s gift for placemaking is remarkable and has never been limited to this address. The bar he and his business partner Mario Di Ienno opened in San Sebastian is suffused with some of the same magic, as was Brooks, the restaurant they ran in the CBD on the site that is now home to Philippe. The Gerald’s service style, too, is surely a movable feast. You can picture Mario delivering some classic Mario material (‘My dear lady, you didn’t come all the way from Mill Park to drink sauvignon blanc. Here, try this verdejo from Spain – and for you sir, a particularly fine pinot noir from Macedon, with our compliments.’) as readily as in the Basque Country or on Lygon Street as you can here.
There’s the crowd, too. It’s a very particular mix. You’ve got punters who have been coming here for the near-20 years the place has been open, but at the same time it’s popular with people who have only been of drinking age this side of the pandemic. Show me another venue that pulls as many people celebrating a 60th as it does Bumble dates, let alone one where they all end up sharing a bottle together. Again, a testament to that ineffable take-all-comers spirit.
This all portends well for Gerald’s 2.0 being a new and special thing. But we must still take a minute to savour the specific wonder of 386 Rathdowne Street; you’ve got until 26 October to fondle the details.
Death is the mother of beauty, wrote Wallace Stevens: the possibility of loss forces us to appreciate the moment. But let’s give the last word on this chapter to that other celebrated man of letters, Gerald Diffey:
“I trade in romance. Sensual pleasures. Sights, sounds, smells, touch, taste. Cyrano de Bergerac said, ‘I have tried to live my whole life with panache.’ If I said that, I’d sound like a twat. But you get the drift.”
Gerald’s Bar’s last service at 386 Rathdowne St, Carlton North, is on Sunday 26 October; for news of its summer reopening at 920 Lygon Street, Carlton North, stay tuned, geraldsbar.com.au, @geraldsbarmelbourne