Matt Swieboda, one of the original founders of Love Tilly Devine, is opening a new European wine bar in Potts Point. Dear Sainte Éloise is be a forty-seat wine bar that will take over the space from the Waterman's Lobster Co, which was Swieboda's seachange from wine until global lobster prices doubled in the last 12 months. Now he's decided he's ready to get back in the game.
Having secured former Love Tilly manager Jasmin Natterer for the project, they then locked in former staff members Ben Abiad (chef) and Nathanial Hatwell (sommelier) and are preparing to open the doors on Tuesday May 23 at 5pm.
The bar was named after a George Orwell quote in which he prays to a saint for wine and bread, and it's very much intended to be a place for the Potts Point community to come for wine and dinner outside their tiny apartments. And Swieboda should know. He has been a resident of the area for eight years now and only has a bar fridge in his kitchen."What is really important to us is having a $25 bowl, that you can have to yourself and is a full meal that you can get on your way home. I would want to be able to walk in and get dinner, a $12 glass of wine and walk out with change from $40. And not just pasta, but also meat and three veg. Last night we had Ben cook for us and we had onions roasted over the fire with celery hearts cooked in chicken stock, Jerusalem artichokes and just a little bit of sliced rare beef. It's the kind of food you'd eat if you were eating well at home," he says.
When it comes to the wine list things hit a grander scale – they've built racks to house up to 1,500 bottles. "We want to remind people of the important growers who have been part of the history of wine making. We want to pay homage to the guys who really established regions around the word and made them the places that young hip wine makers want to go and make wine."
That accessible pricing doesn't stop with the food. "We'll have a ten dollar glass at any given time. I just think some sommeliers maybe are just a little bit lazy in not being able to do that, because we've been able to find some really fantastic things from really interesting parts of the world for those prices. We've got lots of wines in the $40s and so many wines that are under $80 and $100. To be fair, at the top wine bars in Sydney, it's really hard to find wines your really want to drink for under $100 a lot of the time. But we've got a pretty aggressive pricing structure. I think we can do it and it'll be really good."
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