People name their venues in all sorts of ways. After their children, for example. Or after a mood-regulating neurotransmitter, or a 17th-century coffee-smuggling Sufi.

Josh Bayne and Josh Murnane trawled the pages of the venerable Urban Dictionary until they found something they liked. Honeycomb Hideout: “A place to go to get high or have a good time without having to worry about the police.”

The makeshift courtyard packs bleacher-style seating and a canteen window serving pizzas, cheap tinnies, ice-cream and nothing else.

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The concept came about after Fox in the Corn, the year-old pasta joint, opened. Honeycomb Hideout is squeezed into the back of it. The only way to reach it is through the graffiti-riddled back laneway.

“It was our carpark,” Murnane says. “We were having staff drinks out there and my girlfriend said, ‘Why don’t we cut a hole in here [the kitchen wall] and a hole in there [the back fence] and serve beers?’”

Fox in the Corn’s 13-page beer list might be the best in Melbourne. Australia, even. It offers a mix of cutting-edge local brews and rare and classic Europeans. It has a depth that only specialist beer bars can match.

Out back there are just six cans, including Mornington Peninsula Brewery Pale Ale and Lager (only $5); Napoleone Cloudy cider; Rodenbach original (a sour beer); and $8 pints of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

The pizzas are cooked in a stone-base electric oven with a built-in woodchip burner to add a bit of smoke. Then they’re piled with toppings such as five-hour pulled beef; salami and olives; pumpkin and feta.

The bases use flour from Tamworth’s Bellata Gold, which grows and mills its own durum wheat.

It’s the same company that supplies Millgrove, Bayne and Murnane’s wholesale pasta business that predates Fox in the Corn. (They first met working at Alligator Pasta).

“We’ll start with weekends, test our ideas and get better at making pizzas,” Murnane says. “Then we can progress. Hopefully this will be seven days.”

Honeycomb Hideout

4 Droop Street, Footscray (access via the rear laneway only)

(03) 9362 7858

Hours

Fri 5pm–11pm

Sat & Sun 12pm–11pm