Bulletin Place

Bulletin Place is the proof that the best bar in a city does not need to be the biggest, the loudest, or the most elaborately designed. It is a single room on the first floor of a CBD office building, reached by a narrow staircase with no sign on the street below. It seats 12 people. The menu changes every day based on what the team finds at the Sydney markets each morning. It has been, since it opened, one of the 5 best bars in Australia by any meaningful measure.

The concept is genuinely simple: buy the most interesting produce available, design 5 cocktails around it that afternoon, open at 5pm, run until everything is gone or midnight arrives, whichever comes first. The results are cocktails with a precision and a freshness that fixed menus cannot match. A drink built around white peaches and verjuice tastes different in every week of the season, and it disappears from the menu when the peaches do. Nothing on the menu stays longer than a fortnight.

The room holds conversation well for a space this size. The lighting is warm, the bar is close enough that you hear the ice going in as the bartender builds your drink, and the team narrates the menu without being theatrical about it. This is food thinking applied to cocktails, and the result is the most original and technically precise bar experience available anywhere in the CBD. The Sydney cocktail bar guide ranks it first among the Financial District options, and it belongs on any list alongside PS40 as the two most creative drinks programmes in the city.

Our editors recommend finishing a Baxter Inn evening with a stop at Bulletin Place if space permits, or reversing the order and starting with the precision of Bulletin Place before the scale and depth of the Baxter Inn takes over the night.