Neighbourhood bars are as essential to a community as a the local pub, hairdressers or chip shop, so when Fitzroy North’s Monty’s opened it’s no surprise locals welcomed the newest addition to St Georges Road like an old friend. Taking up the space where the dark and moody Deco Wine Bar used to be, new owner Monty Mullooly-Hill and partners Oscar Herman, Paul Milne and Ravi Thompson have reinvigorated it with a brighter coat of paint and a long bar made for chatting up locals.
Mullooly-Hill and his partners met whilst working behind the bar at watering holes including Prudence, Joe’s Shoe Store, and The Workers Club, during which time they figured out what worked and didn’t work at these local bars.
“We wanted to recreate the look and feel of a classic neighbourhood bar, mixed in with the atmosphere of outback pubs,” Mullooly-Hill says. There’s certainly a touch of Australiana everywhere at Monty’s – the beer list is mainly local, the walls are adorned by vintage landscape prints and native Australian plants are potted along the beer garden.
The local focus means weeknights often see lone patrons and mid-week catch-ups settle in at the bar. The nine-metre-long ‘saloon style’ bar is a great spot for solo diners if you feel like making friends with the bartender; otherwise the smaller booths further inside offer some privacy. Food comes by way of neighbouring pizzeria 1000 Lire , and bar snacks come from fellow local Hana Assafiri’s new nut roaster the Moroccan Soup Bar Deli-Cacy.
No detail is left out. Every Friday and Saturday, the Monty’s crew invites their musically inclined friends to man the decks with records that usually run the gamut of old-school soul and funk. Mullooly-Hill is also planning to host Sunday sessions to get the beer garden pumping, so with the Edinburgh Gardens just a stone’s throw away, Monty’s never fails to attract post-park stragglers on warmer days.