Stitch Bar, Wynyard

It’s time for our first bar review! On a friend’s recommendation, we head to Stitch Bar which is behind Wynyard station on York Street and located down a very unassuming entrance. If we didn’t know how to get there, we would’ve walked straight past it since it doesn’t look anything like a bar, but rather some sort of textiles shop with quaint sewing paraphernalia in the window display.

But once you get downstairs, you find yourself in a whole different world – a cosy, chilled out kind of bar with dim lighting, vintage furniture and various little booths lining the walls of the bar. We are lucky enough to get ourselves a booth after a bit of a wait and we squish in to the surprisingly comfortable couches and admire the pretty lamp on the newspaper decorated wall, which is casting a warm yellow light on all our faces. It kind of feels like we’ve been transported to some hole in the wall bar in Melbourne and this is a rare feeling in the middle of Sydney’s business district.

Our friend explains that Stitch Bar has fabulous cocktails and we are a bit overwhelmed with the several pages of choices available. We scour the menu to find a combination that has all the things we love in one sweet cocktail and I settle on the Strawberry Swing, while my fellow girlfriends get a Monkey Magic and a Wicked Lady. The boys decide to be men and get some sort of 54% alcohol whisky (smells foul, by the way) and a Monteith’s beer – nice New Zealand brand.

The cocktails are a bit pricier than what you would pay at other more conventional city bars but the quality shows through – my Strawberry Swing comes served in a small and squat glass, according to the menu it contains strawberries and basil leaves gently bruised, shaken with 42 below vodka and topped with Chandon sparkling. The basil leaves are a bit too strong for my liking but the drink is a nice mix between sweet and sour, with a hint of fizz so that it all tastes a bit like liquid strawberry sherbet.

The 3 cocktails – Strawberry Swing, $19, Monkey Magic $19.50 and Wicked Lady $18

The 2 tall glasses are the Monkey Magic (the lime coloured one) and the Wicked Lady (pink coloured one). The Wicked Lady is a lot stronger than its appearance would suggest, a strong hit of tequila is the first thing you taste and not much else after that, even though it’s supposed to have some grapefruit and lime juice in it too.

The Monkey Magic is on the other end of the spectrum, tastes nothing like alcohol but is a sweet refreshing drink of Premium Sagatiba Cachaca shaken with fresh apple juice, vanilla syrup, a hint of lime juice and ginger beer. This is supposedly one of their more popular cocktails and it’s easy to see why. They also offer some savoury nibbles, which we didn’t get a chance to try out but apparently their hotdogs are to die for!

So if you’re looking for a bar that’s a little different from the usual Sydney offerings, try heading down the rabbithole to Stitch Bar, it may be located conveniently at Wynyard but it’s a world away from the other bars in the area.

Stitch Bar
61 York Street
Wynyard NSW 2000
Ph: 9279 0380

Stitch on Urbanspoon

5 Comments

  • JasmyneTea says:

    Looks like a great bar, but DAMN was your drink expensive for the size!

  • minibites says:

    I didn’t find my stitch experience as good as yours, my cocktails were horrible 🙁 you should definitely check out grandma’s which isn’t too far off, their cocktails are amazing!

  • Lau says:

    I’m not a fan. If you get there much later than 4:30/5:00pm you line up for ages. They’ve got a numbers board like it’s a supermarket deli and they take your credit card to make sure you don’t run off without paying. Not to mention once when I was there, we asked them to turn the music down a touch and the waitress seemed powerless to do so.

    My advice? If you must go, go at lunch time, when there’s room to move. There are plenty of less crowded small bars around.

  • love this place! was thinking of having my birthday here when it was prohibition themed! =)

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