The Hot List is the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences, updated weekly. Learn more.

This week’s Hot List activity

• Added: Slowpoke Lounge & Lookout
• Most trending restaurant: Marmelo
• Most trending bar: Le Splendide
• Most trending cafe: Hareruya Pantry

Summer’s best rooftop opens in autumn

To be classified as a building, you need to have a roof. And Melbourne has acquired a lot of new buildings recently, which means a lot of new roofs. So where are all the rooftop bars?

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After all, it’s summer (basically), and Melbourne still has about six weeks before it becomes glacially cold until October. We should have had a flood of new rooftop openings over the last few months. Instead we’ve been in a drought.

Sure, we’ve had great ones like Her Rooftop, Good Heavens, Runner Up and Johnny’s Green Room open in the last few years, but rooftops of consequence just don’t seem to open very often. You know the last time we covered a rooftop bar on Broadsheet Melbourne? Start of November 2024, with (the excellent, Hot-Listed) Inuman.

It was our summer without rooftop bars.

And that’s a crying shame. I’m as big a fan of Rooftop Bar and Naked in the Sky as the next guy, but one is old enough to vote and the other will be able to watch MA15+ movies this year. It’s 2025. Melbourne needs new players in the rooftop bar game.

This week we got one, with Slowpoke. And it’s going straight on The Hot List. This Collingwood bar took three mates two years to (almost entirely) build themselves, and it’s a clear labour of love. There’s a real straight out-the-gate identity and sensibility here, which is especially refreshing in a genre that – understandably – tends to let its views do the heavy lifting.

Swing by for a cracking cocktail or a fun wine from a young local Aussie maker. There may not be a kitchen just yet (stay tuned) but courtesy of the team’s background in live events such as Daybreak Festival, it has some of the best DJs – local and international – on speed dial. So expect plenty of sunset sets.

It took until autumn to get the rooftop of the summer, but it was worth the wait.

The Everleigh, one of Melbourne’s most influential bars, closes

The Everleigh, which opened in 2011, closed for good this week. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this cocktail bar’s contribution to Melbourne’s bar scene over the last decade and change.

Even if you never visited the Gertrude Street bar, you would have encountered its influence elsewhere in the city – whether it was an idea co-opted by another venue, or a drink or drinks list made by one of the bar’s many alumni.

To get a sense of the legacy it’s leaving behind, read this piece by Broadsheet’s Australia editor, Nick Connellan. This year The Hot List has already farewelled Sunda due to closure, and now just over a month later we have to say goodbye to a true Melbourne institution.

I wish I’d known that my last cocktail at The Everleigh would be my last-ever cocktail at The Everleigh. I probably would have sipped it more slowly, and I definitely would have ordered another round. It’s a reminder that if there’s somewhere you’ve been really meaning to try, don’t wait around and assume it’ll be there forever. Go as soon as you can.

broadsheet.com.au/hotlist/melbourne

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