Maybe Sammy’s next cocktail list, titled Showtime, lands next week. It’s a menu which has been in development since August in 2024, and has gone through a number of iterations, and follows on from their previous menu, The Grand Maybe Sammy Hotel (which you can read about here).
A quick Maybe Sammy primer for those who don’t know the bar: Maybe Sammy has been the city’s most talked about bar since it opened in early 2019 on a dreary stretch of street in The Rocks; since then, a combination of theatrics, over the top good times, attentive and fun service, and delicious drinks have kept punters coming back. There’s a reason they’ve been named the best bar in Australasia five times, and landed on The World’s 50 Best every year since opening — they’re irrepressible when it comes to the guest experience, the kind of bar you leave having had your night made better, and with a story to tell. In the Boothby Best Bars awards, they’ve picked up the titles of Best Hospitality Team in NSW 2024, and Best Cocktail Bar in NSW 2023, along with Person of the Year NSW for their co-owner, Stefano Catino, in 2022. Their cocktails regularly land on the Boothby Top 50 Drinks of the Year, too.
Okay, explainer out of the way — onto the new Showtime menu, which launches Wednesday 17th.
On the new list, there are 12 signature cocktails, as well as five classic cocktail riffs for those who like the tried and true — including a Banana Daiquiri riff I’m keen to get back to taste soon. There is also a section of High Roller drinks, classics made with more expensive hooch.
The menu takes the form of a packet of cinema tickets, each with a different movie — it might be The Grand Budapest Hotel, Willy Wonka, or Oceans 11 — which inspires a cocktail of the same name. You can flip through the tickets to pick your drink, and on each ticket there is a QR code which leads you to a new Maybe Sammy website and their videos on Instagram (you can see some of those here). It’s all designed to be a little bit more of an interactive experience.
The new menu — which was designed by the group’s head of marketing, Tess Hayley — is also considerably more compact than their previous menu, which featured the cocktails laid out around a Monopoly-like fold out board, which means it’s a little easier to handle, something that came from the feedback they picked up on the last list.
Below, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, I spoke to bar manager Hunter Gregory about three drinks from the new list, what the development process was like, and more.
BOOTHBY: Hunter, what’s the big idea with this new menu?
HUNTER GREGORY: We wanted to bring Showtime to life, and combine all of the ideas that Maybe Sammy has held true since its evolution.