What happens when a drinks menu is given the same creative weight as the kitchen? At Lexy, it lands as a cocktail program that feels deliberate from top to tail – tight, technical, and built with the same level of care you’d expect from the pass.
There’s no filler here. Where plenty of venues fall back on the familiar, Lexy leans into flavour, texture, and technique, pulling influence from across Asia without tipping into gimmick. The brief is clear: drinks should hold their own alongside the food, while quietly running a more sustainable operation behind the scenes. That means ingredients are stretched, repurposed, and reworked across the menu – less waste, more intention.
Head Bartender Jordan Taskovski is the one steering it, and by his own admission, the path to the final menu wasn’t exactly straightforward.
“Building Lexy was a bit of an insane undertaking, and what we originally thought would be the menu was definitely nowhere near what we landed with,” he says. “We wanted to create authentic Asian fusion, a blend between our incredible chefs and their backgrounds, including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesian, and Korea. I am definitely not in that bracket, so I gave up on trying to make Asian inspired cocktails.”
Instead, Taskovski set some hard rules.
“I wanted to hit three main targets: every drink needed to be a single pour and batch stable, the cocktails needed to mean something – a point of nostalgia from someone in the team – and they needed to be as sustainable as possible.”
That framework shows up in the glass. The Mango Laksa skews savoury and aromatic, layering Thai gin with fresh mango and lime leaf. The Key Lime Pie leans full dessert mode – rum, Biscoff, horchata and meringue – while the Forbidden Leaf brings pandan, yuzu and a bright tropical lift. It reads like a list of ideas, but more importantly, ideas that have been properly resolved.
Technique does a lot of the heavy lifting. “Milk punching helped a lot for stability, and utilising pectinase for fruit clarification gave me much more stable fruit syrups,” Taskovski explains. “Outside of that I took a lot of inspiration from techniques and ingredients the chefs were using, like kombu concentrate, shio koji and a whole variety of different chillies.”
Then there’s the sustainability angle – not as a buzzword but baked into how the bar runs.
“Zero waste actually made the menu a lot easier,” he says. “After making raspberry syrup with pectinase, I could dehydrate the leftover and use it as a garnish. The chefs use a lot of grapefruit and pomelo juice, but none of the peels, so boom, we had our grapefruit peel Paloma out of the kitchen’s waste.”
It goes further than a few clever garnishes. “I think the most intense project was building an organic cola out of nothing but wastage product. We keep all the leftover limes and put all of them to work – about 60 a week, with coriander root and leftover pandan and lime leaf to make this super complex and healthy mocktail.”
Of course, constraints come with trade-offs.
“I would say the batch stable single bottle portion of the menu limits me the most – no creams, no fresh juices. Every new cocktail has me testing the shelf life of every ingredient, and when it doesn’t work, I have to go back to the drawing board,” he says. “Overall, the limitations have made me a much better bartender. I can’t just make and use everything I want – I have to constantly go outside of my comfort zone.”
Elsewhere on the list, the “Modern Retro” section sharpens up classics with small, deliberate tweaks, while the “Freezer Door” lineup is all precision: an Australian Negroni, a Three Gin Martini, both stripped back and dialled in.
Taskovski, now 10 months into Lexy and nearly 15 with the wider group, has spent a decade in the industry refining that approach. “I’ve been in the industry for 10 years now, with the last 16 months being sober, and I honestly did not expect I would love it this much,” he says.
Next step? Bigger systems, tighter execution – and if things go Taskovski’s way, a prep kitchen to match the ambition behind the bar.