Kayla Saito has been mixing liquids together for as long as she can recall.

“I remember being in school and combining juices together and selling them to kids,” she tells Broadsheet. A drink called “the spider web”, where she blended apple juice and Dr Pepper and finished it with a splash of lemonade, was one of her earliest creations.

“I just really wanted to be behind the bar. I really wanted to take drinks, to take liquid, combine them and make something delicious and give it to people. That’s basically it.” When she was 17, Saito, who grew up in Nashville and Hawaii, took a six-week mixology course in the basement of a Nashville bowling alley and hasn’t looked back since.

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She’s now a bartender and is currently in charge of cocktails at new Abbotsford restaurant Molli from The Mulberry Group (Hazel, Dessous, Lilac). Saito has created an exceptional menu that’s evenly split between low and non-alc drinks and alcoholic cocktails. “Non-alcoholic [drinks] are really difficult. They’re difficult to nail, and then they’re difficult to sell, they’re difficult to price. They’re difficult to make. They’re difficult.”

We caught up with Saito to discuss some of the drinks she’s most excited about.

You Send Me (Non-Alc)

KS: The kitchen uses these beautiful baby carrots from our farm. But sometimes when the carrots come in, they’re way too big or they’re already broken, or maybe we don’t want to use the tops. So we take those carrots, juice them, and we make this delicious little savoury-sour-sweet number.

Imagine a carrot juice with fresh habaneros from the farm, and a little bit of spice, and then passionfruit that’s caramelised – I melt sugar in a pan and then deglaze it with passionfruit juice – and then it’s shaken, so it’s nice and fluffy, and then we pour it on a block with mountain marigold and some passionfruit.

We’ve been using song names for drink names recently, and we have a really good record collection. So we went through and everyone picked You Send Me by Al Green.



Kombucha. Courtesy of Molli / Tim Harris

Kombucha (low-alc)

Kombucha is a fermented soda; it’s usually a two-step process, but we kind of do one and a half steps.

The tea itself uses this scoby – it’s like that jelly mat that floats on the top of the tea surface. So you take tea, you add sugar, you add a bit of its old batch back in just to make a nice environment, and add the scoby itself.

She’s called Scoby Dooby Doo, I think she’s six years old now and she’s travelled with me. She’s so productive, it’s crazy. Sugar ferments into alcohol, and the alcohol gets fermented into acid, so it’s a kind of a parallel fermentation that happens inside the batch, and then we take that batch and we season it or flavour it with fresh juice or something else special.

The head chef Alexis [Kalnins] we’re using his mum’s kumquats. She brought them to me last year. I prepare them a Japanese way where you basically cook them in water on a really slow simmer, you clean the seeds out with a toothpick and you boil it over and over, replacing the water until it kind of turns into this gelatinous, wonderful texture. And you add sugar – I used a leather wood honey – and it basically preserves the kumquats. They’ve been sitting in their own syrup, and we use the syrup to flavour the kombucha. I’m using essential tea, but it includes a preservation and a fermentation.



The Bullet Proof. Courtesy of Molli / Julia Sansone

The Bullet Proof (alc)

I wanted to put a coffee drink on our nitro tap. So we’ve got The Gospel Solera Rye – that’s a local rye that really stands up, and we’re using beurre noisette [brown butter] from the kitchen. We’re washing the rye with it, so you bring the rye up to a nice little warm temperature and infuse the burnt butter. We have a blast chiller, so you just chuck it in there, and it freezes really quickly. And then you strain off the butter solids, and you get this really rich, silky, delicious rye that still has rye character, but also nuttiness and creaminess from the butter.

We’re doing a really rich cold brew and we’re using Grada, which is my favourite coffee liqueur from Melbourne. Instead of adding sugar syrup to sweeten, we toast the sugar first, just to give it more caramel quality, and instead of adding water, we add whey from the cheese for extra salinity in there and creaminess, and it’s so much better than water. We put it on nitro and that’s it.