Bar of the Year: Three Horses

Rob Libecans, Matt Stirling and Ryan Noreiks will go down in Melbourne cocktail history, and they would have even if they’d never opened Three Horses, the winner of this year’s Good Food Guide Bar of the Year. Caretaker’s Cottage, the trio’s other venue (and the winner of the same accolade in 2022), already had them on the global map for its historic location, music-geek sound system and incomparable freezer martinis.

Three Horses, which sits just stumbling distance from Caretaker’s, had to be different enough to warrant expansion while maintaining all of the excellence that we’ve come to expect from this crew. We’ve gotta say: they hit it out of the park. This is one of the most convivial rooms in the city, its bar backed by a dream-like horse mural that’s park Lisa Frank, part Salvador Dali.

The menu’s focus on sherry offers a whole new playground for drinkers, from hard-to-find, interesting pours to truly ingenious cocktails. This spring saw a daiquiri made with sugar snap peas, while your sherry cobbler might get its depth from gochujang.

The bar team are smart and engaged and seem genuinely happy to be there, leaving the cliche of the serious cocktail bar as a bastion of snobbery firmly in the past, where it belongs.

That’s the beauty of Three Horses: it subverts and exceeds expectations at every delicious, joyous, sherry-soaked turn.