The team behind Lefty’s Oldtime Music Hall have got a brand new Brisbane bar, Seymour’s Cocktails & Oysters.
“The idea for Seymour’s Cocktails & Oysters came about when we were workshopping what to do with the space directly next door to Lefty’s Old Time Music Hall,” says Jason Scott, who owns the bar with Jamie Webb.
“We wanted to do a bit of a more mature and ‘serious about drinks’ cocktail bar than was available in the immediate area, but still something with sense of ‘Lefty’s’ fun,” he says.
To get that done, they’ve brought on board some bartending firepower to keep things elevated. Well respected bartender (and number three finisher in this year’s Bartender of the Year) Dan Gregory is on hand to lead the bar, with ex-Cobbler bar manager Cameron Pirret on the tins as his second in charge, and Joey Chisholm (ex-Cobbler and Lefty’s) bringing his rapid-fire chat to round out the team.
The bar itself takes you to 1920’s New Orleans, to the Storyville district in particular — the area where you’d find opium dens of Chinatown and parlours of prostitutes, New Orleans’ very own red light district, of which we written before:
It was a part of town, neighbouring the Treme and the French Quarter, in which prostitution was allowed in order to keep it out of other neighbourhoods. This experiment ended in 1917, just 20 years after it began — but the result, expectedly, was that prostitution and houses of ill-repute just set up shop someplace else. As the mayor of New Orleans at the time said, “you can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”
“We wanted to be able to draw a line from Lefty’s to Seymours and although they are different beasts, make sure stylistically they make sense next to each other,” Scott says. “Musically we are still in the Bayou, classic crackling NOLA marching band swing records segue into newer piano boogie artists who might have played at Preservation Hall last week. Nearly 90 per cent of the music played is recorded in New Orleans. There’s also a spunky little upright piano, and it’s not just a pretty face.
“For setting the room, we loved two pictorial books, one detailing found 1920’s photo’s of original working ladies of the Storyville district, the other containing photo’s, menus and stories from the now closed down restaurants of NOLA from the early 20th century. Both these books helped us imagine the room how we would have liked it back then. We like to think that the ladies of Storyville after a hard shift might have gathered at Seymours to have a late plate of oysters and a Martini and a bit of a gossip.”
As you might expect, the cocktails are leaning on New Orleans’ classics: you can get a Sazerac there, of course, but their also doing their own take on the Hurricane (complete with Hurricane glass). We like the look of the Spaniard Orchid, too, which brings together palo cortado sherry, calvados, ambrato vermouth, banana liqueur and orange bitters and looks like a heck of a good time; so too the Willie Mae’s Julep (bourbon, pineau des charentes, lemon honey, orgeat, and mint) because you need more pineau des charentes — a mistelle from the Cognac region made from unfermented grape juice and fortified with grape spirit — in your life.
Take a look at more pictures of Seymour’s below.
