Gimlet at Cavendish House is the grand room on our list — a soaring, marble-and-brass European dining bar in a heritage 1920s building, from one of Australia's most celebrated restaurateurs. It plays old-world glamour with total conviction, and in 2025 it won Restaurant Bar of the Year at the Australian Bar Awards. It sits at No. 6 on our national ranking.
Where the bars around it trade on intimacy, laneway secrecy or dive-bar energy, Gimlet does the opposite: it goes big, glamorous and unabashedly grand. Walk in off Russell Street and you find high ceilings, arched windows, burgundy leather booths and a long marble bar built for perching — a room that conjures the golden-age glamour of a great European or American grand café. It is proof that Australia does the polished, all-out restaurant bar as well as anywhere in the world, and it is one of the most gratifying places in Melbourne to spend an hour or an entire evening.
Why it's Australia's No. 6 bar
The anchor is the award. At the 2025 Australian Bar Awards, Gimlet took Restaurant Bar of the Year — recognition that, in the increasingly important category where great bars and great restaurants overlap, it stands at the very top in Australia. That category matters more each year as the line between eating and drinking out blurs, and Gimlet is its definitive expression: a place where the bar is not an appendage to the dining room but a destination in its own right.
We rank it No. 6 because its excellence is, above all, about flawless execution of a known idea — the grand European bar, done to perfection — rather than the boundary-pushing originality of some of the rooms above it. But do not mistake that for a knock. Operating at this level of polish, consistency and scale is extraordinarily hard, and few bars anywhere pull off grandeur without stiffness the way Gimlet does. It is glamorous and serious yet genuinely warm, and that balance is exactly why it earns a place near the top of the country's best.
A 1920s building, restored to glamour
Gimlet occupies the heritage-listed Cavendish House, a 1920s building on the corner of Russell Street and Flinders Lane in the CBD, and the setting is a huge part of the experience. The design — by the acclaimed studio behind many of Melbourne's most beautiful rooms — leans into 20th-century grandeur with black-and-gold marble bars, plush leather booths, geometric tiles and honeycomb chandeliers, drawing on influences from mid-century European design to the glamour of old Chicago. The effect is a room that feels both timeless and theatrical, grand without being cold.
Crucially, the space is designed so the bar leads. Gimlet has been described by its own team as "a bar first, and a dining room second," and the layout reflects it: the long marble bar is built for solo drinkers and walk-ins, not just for guests waiting on a table. That means you can experience the full glamour of the room with nothing more than a martini in hand — a democratic touch that turns a fine-dining-grade space into somewhere you can drop into for a drink, and one of the reasons it works so well as a bar rather than merely a restaurant with a bar attached.
Andrew McConnell and Trader House
Gimlet is the work of Andrew McConnell, one of the most decorated names in Australian hospitality, and his Trader House group — the team behind a run of Melbourne's most respected restaurants. Gimlet was McConnell's major CBD opening in 2020, and it arrived with the confidence and craft of an operator at the peak of his powers. That pedigree is why Gimlet is not simply a beautiful room but a genuinely excellent one: the kitchen and bar are held to restaurant standards, and the hospitality is polished in the way only a serious, well-run group can sustain.
That restaurant-group DNA is what elevates Gimlet above a merely handsome hotel-style bar. The food is the work of a celebrated kitchen, the wine list has the depth of a serious dining room, and the cocktails are made with the same rigour — but all of it is delivered with the ease and warmth that keep the grandeur from tipping into pretension. It is the rare grand bar that feels like a treat rather than a test.
The drinks, the oysters, and the wood-fired kitchen
The classic Gimlet order is one of the great simple pleasures in Melbourne: a martini or the bar's namesake gimlet, and a plate of rock oysters, freshly shucked to order and served with thinly sliced rye and seaweed butter. It is an hour of near-perfect eating and drinking that costs a fraction of a full meal and delivers all of the room's glamour. The cocktails are classic and precise — this is a bar that reveres the canon rather than chasing novelty — and they are matched by a serious wine list and champagne by the glass.
Should you want more, the full menu leans European and American, much of it cooked over a wood-fired oven, mixing old-world technique with new-world confidence, and running all the way up to caviar and truffles. But the beauty of Gimlet is that you never have to commit to a full dinner to enjoy it. A seat at the marble bar, a cold martini and a dozen oysters is one of the best-value hours of glamour money can buy in the city — and it is exactly the experience the bar was designed to deliver.
Who drinks here, and what to order
Gimlet draws a broad, grown-up crowd: pre- and post-theatre diners, couples marking an occasion, solo drinkers who know the bar seat is the best in the house, and anyone who appreciates a beautiful room done properly. It is superb for a date, a celebration, or a civilised drink before dinner elsewhere, and it works from a mid-afternoon martini right through to late. To order well, take a seat at the bar, ask for a martini or a gimlet, and add a plate of oysters; it is the definitive Gimlet experience and needs nothing else. If you are settling in for longer, lean on the staff for a wine recommendation and let the wood-fired kitchen do the rest.
The neighbourhood and where to go next
Gimlet sits in the heart of the Melbourne CBD, on the edge of the city's famous small-bar grid, which makes it a natural first or last stop on a grand night out. For contrast, pair its polish with the pared-back perfection of our No. 1 bar, Caretaker's Cottage, or the bespoke classicism of Above Board in Collingwood — a study in how differently great Melbourne bars can express themselves. Our full Melbourne bar guide maps the rest of the city, and the national best bars in Australia ranking shows where Gimlet sits among the country's best.
Planning your visit
Gimlet at Cavendish House is on Russell Street, on the corner of Flinders Lane, in the Melbourne CBD — an easy walk from Flinders Street and Parliament stations and well served by the city's trams. It runs from lunch through to late, which is part of its appeal: you can come for a mid-afternoon martini, a pre-dinner drink or a nightcap. Bookings are wise if you want to dine, but the marble bar is designed to welcome walk-ins, so a seat and a drink are often available even when the dining room is full; check current hours and reservations on the venue's website before a special trip.
On price, Gimlet sits in the $$$ bracket — this is a grand, restaurant-grade room, and a full meal with wine is a significant occasion — but the bar-seat experience of a martini and oysters is far more accessible than the setting suggests, and one of the smartest ways to enjoy a beautiful room without a full dinner spend. Dress is smart-casual; the room rewards a little effort but imposes no strict code. Come ready to enjoy some old-world glamour, take a seat at the bar, and you will understand why Gimlet is Australia's reigning restaurant bar.
The wine list and the cellar
One area where Gimlet's restaurant DNA pays obvious dividends is the wine. Because it is run by a serious dining group rather than a cocktail operator, the bar carries a list with the depth and range of a proper restaurant cellar — a genuine reason to visit in its own right. You can drink by the glass with real breadth, from champagne to characterful European bottles, and the floor staff have the knowledge to steer you well whether you are spending modestly or splurging. For a certain kind of drinker, a glass of something excellent and a plate of oysters at the marble bar is the platonic Gimlet visit, and the strength of the wine program is a big part of why the bar rewards return trips. It is the sort of list you can work through slowly over many visits, which is exactly what a great grand bar should offer.
Champagne, in particular, is treated with the seriousness the room's glamour demands. A glass of fizz at the bar as the afternoon tips into evening is one of the quiet luxuries of the Melbourne CBD, and it captures the whole appeal of Gimlet in a single pour: proper quality, delivered with ease, in a beautiful room, without any need to commit to a full and formal meal.
A bar for every hour
Part of what makes Gimlet so useful, and so beloved, is that it works at almost any time of day. Because it trades from lunch through to late, it can be a mid-afternoon martini when you want to feel like the day is yours, a pre-theatre or pre-dinner drink, a full dinner, or a nightcap in a grand room after everything else has closed. Few bars are this versatile, and fewer still hold their standard across such a long service. That flexibility is a large part of why Gimlet has become a genuine institution in its short life: it is not a bar you visit only for a special occasion, but one you can fold into an ordinary day and have it feel like a treat. Whether you have twenty minutes or a whole evening, the room delivers.
The craft behind the bar
It is easy to be so taken with Gimlet's room that you overlook how good the bartending is, but the drinks reward attention. This is a classic-cocktail bar in the truest sense: the focus is on the canon — the martini, the namesake gimlet, the great stirred and shaken standards — made with the precision of a kitchen that plates to the millimetre. There is no chasing of novelty for its own sake here, no twenty-ingredient showpieces; there is the confidence to serve the classics exactly right, which is harder and rarer than it sounds. The bartenders work the long marble counter with the poise of people who understand that at a bar this grand, understatement is the point.
That restraint is a deliberate match for the food and wine. A great martini does not compete with a plate of oysters or a glass of something serious; it complements them, and Gimlet's whole programme is built around that harmony. The result is a bar where every element — room, drink, food, service — pulls in the same direction, toward a particular idea of grown-up, old-world pleasure. It is that coherence, as much as any single element, that makes the place feel so complete.
How Gimlet compares
Within our national top 20, Gimlet occupies a distinct niche. Where Caretaker's Cottage wins on intimate restraint and Byrdi on radical experimentation, Gimlet wins on grandeur and polish — it is the room you choose when you want scale, glamour and the reassurance of flawless execution. It shares a certain old-world glamour with Sydney's Maybe Sammy and Dean & Nancy on 22, but where those lean theatrical and mid-century, Gimlet plays a grand European-café register, anchored by a serious kitchen. It is the definitive Australian restaurant bar, and the first name to reach for when the occasion calls for something genuinely grand.
The verdict
Gimlet at Cavendish House is the bar we send anyone who wants glamour done properly — a grand, gorgeous room where the cocktails, the oysters and the service all live up to the setting. It is the definitive Australian restaurant bar, and its genius is that you can experience all of it from a single seat at the marble bar with a martini in hand. Restaurant Bar of the Year is the industry's confirmation of what a visit makes obvious: for the grand, all-out bar experience, nowhere in the country does it better. Take a bar stool, order a martini and a dozen oysters, and settle into one of Melbourne's most beautiful hours.