First look: Showtime, the new cocktail menu from Maybe Sammy
Tasting (and talking) through three drinks from the award-winning bar’s new list.
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.
We wanted to bring it in two formats. One that we could showcase to the world a little bit better than what we did with our previous menu, and we wanted to bring back that interactivity between drinks and make each drink not necessarily just a cocktail, but an experience.
The menu looks a little bit like a 1950s, 60s movie cinema collection of tickets. On the back of the menu, we have our Beer, Wine and Spirit selection with our Minis, as always. And then we have some High Roller cocktails, and some twists on classics.
You’ve always had the high rollers, right?
High rollers we’ve always done.
The idea is you can experience being a part of Crocodile Dundee (the movie and the drink) at Maybe Sammy by scanning the QR code on the menu, which takes you to our new website, and it will direct you to Instagram. We wanted to create a lot of buzz around our Instagram, and showcase our drinks to everyone.
Also, everyone’s often on their phones at bars, so give them something to do that’s about the bar.
Exactly. When we launched the Stardust menu we had interactive filters for Instagram. But with this menu we wanted to bring it alive a little bit more, and bring the people who work in the venue every single day to the forefront, showcase the team.
Walk us through the Willy Wonka.
This is the new bubble cocktail. It features Grey Goose, cherry liqueur, cherry cordial, a house made preparation. And then we fat wash that cordial with white chocolate and milk. So it has this nice, rich mouthfeel and we infuse the Grey Goose with a hazelnut paste.
It also brings to life our collaboration and partnership with Flavour Blaster over the years. This is a two-tone classic vodka sour. This is designed to be super approachable.
And then of course, as always, we do the bubble in front of the guests. The new attachment to the Flavour Blaster gives them a multi-bubble.
You always need more bubbles.
The idea of this drink is to bring the vodka Sour to life, we create a little bit more texture and viscosity with the fat washing elements of the drink. Then we finish off with this bubble factory on top, it’s like a chocolate factory that you can pop as you wish. We’ve actually got a scent designed for us by Flavour Blaster, it’s their white chocolate scent — they actually called it Willy Wonka.
It’s quite a crowd-pleasing drink.
It’s definitely a crowd-pleaser. Something easy, breezy, to begin with.
We actually needed to come up with a concept for using this bubble that made sense. We wanted to use this Flavour Blaster attachment for so long, it’s been on the market now for eight or nine months, and we needed to find a new way to break ground on something that’s been done a billion times before.
The bubble has to be on the drink for a reason.
Yeah, exactly and we take full inspiration from that bubble scene in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, where Charlie’s floating around.
That makes sense with the milk chocolate scent.
Milk inside the drink, cherry, Augustus Gloop — I know that’s blueberries, but who cares?
That’s tasty. You guys change the menu once a year. What’s the time frame for that, when do you really start getting to work on the next list?
So this one has been a little bit of a tricky one because we’ve been We started planning this menu last August. It’s been 12 months in the making.
And the idea with changing the menu once a year is to make as much of an impact as you possibly can, right? There’s no point in putting heaps of work in behind the scenes, the labour hours, if it doesn’t make an impact. The idea of Maybe Sammy is that there’s always been a very strong focus on the drinks, but the drinks are part of the experience.
How does this menu compare to others in terms of prep costs?
I limit myself to 19 to 29 hours labour for the prep for the menu. The Mirage menu was the most prep intensive. Mirage was 38 hours a week.
Talk us through this drink, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
So this one is called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It’s a smoky, classic Paloma style of drink, designed by (group beverage director) Paolo Maffietti using smoked rooibos soda. We actually burn some sugar as the sugar element within the soda, and infuse that with the rooibos. Inside we have some tequila, a touch of sherry, some other little bits and bobs, with a grapefruit cordial. On top is a grapefruit granita garnished with lemon balm. With the grapefruit granita, we freeze fresh grapefruit juice, then whisk it out of the frozen container to create these ice shards, and then ball them up. The idea being so you can pick it up and eat it, or you can let it melt into the drink.
It’s a Paloma twist, bringing together all the flavours of a spaghetti western with a bit of a Mexican twist.
So how many drinks on the list?
Inside we have 12 signatures. We have five twists on classics. We wanted to stay true to the classics because they’re actually mentioned in the films: in The Godfather they actually mention a banana Daiquiri, and so we’ve done a twist on that. Same thing for Sex and the City, we did a twist on the Cosmo.
The Cosmo is back, folks.
For James Bond we did a twist on a Vesper. Mad Men’s a twist on Old Fashioned.
Obviously.
And Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a twist on a Singapore Sling.
I haven’t seen that movie in 20 years.
I had to watch it, it’s my first time watching it. We ready for the next drink?
Go for it.
So this next drink is The Grand Budapest Hotel. This is a twist on a classic Gimlet, we wanted to use watermelon and pink ginger as our main flavours. We used Kota, the pandan liqueur from Nico de Soto. And then I actually stumbled across a bar technique where you use spent espresso as a wash.
What we do is take the spent coffee grains from the espresso that we make for ourselves, and you filter the cocktail through them in a ratio that makes sense. It’s such a cool technique, and when I found it I was like, that’s going on the next menu.
What does it give to the drink there?
It gives a nice little nuttiness, a little caramel.
Is it aromatic?
Yeah. It’s just building complexity.
So this is the Lobby Boy glassware supported by Hendrick’s Gin. In this drink, the gin base is Hendrick’s, there’s a touch of cucumber, pandan liqueur compliments that cucumber, watermelon and pink ginger, and builds on that complexity. A touch of acids in the cordial, of course, and then coffee wash.
There’s a lovely nuttiness on the finish there. That’s really cool.
This drink was designed by Marco De Lazzari. This menu is always somewhat collaborative. But the drinks definitely are owned by certain people — this one is owned by Marco.
And [head bartender] Luca Goffredo has done most of the rest of the menu, he has done such a great job with this menu.
Where are yours?
Mine are all on the back. I did a couple of the classics and then I helped the team finish off theirs with little techniques that you see, glassware and that sort of thing.
That’s a really good drink. What does the pandan do for the drink, or does it bind it all together?
It’s bit of a binder. I mean, it’s just a low ABV sort of blender, touch more sugar, a little bit more body.
So how does it work? Development started a long time ago, and you’re saying everyone’s got some input and then you kind of work on ideas. How does that happen?
What we’ll do is we’ll pitch some ideas. We’ll come in a little bit early one day, and we’ll grab coffees, and pitch some ideas of what we want the next menu to be. Giorgio Gervasoni came up with the concept of this menu. He wanted to do a Netflix-inspired menu, an online-only menu that would be familiar enough that people aren’t put off by the idea there’s only an online menu.
But we also wanted to showcase the team a little bit more than we have in previous times — the Netflix idea would be be directed by or made by one of the team. The same thing that has been happening on Instagram with our recent videos.
This menu has gone through about four or five or six reiterations. We came up with the concept, we pitched it to [co-owner] Stefano Catino, he said yes. Then he said one week he doesn’t like certain things about it, so we adapted. And we adapted and we adapted and we adapted and we adapted. We went from 15 drinks to 12, 12 drinks to 17 with classics, changing the drinks, changing the inspiration — all of a sudden, for example, the whole recipe that is designed around that the movie Crazy Rich Asians go out the window, because now we switched it to Oceans 11.
Which probably makes more sense in the Maybe Sammy universe.
Which is why we did it. All of the changes were necessary and that’s how we got to where we are today.
Do you have any particular favourite drink?
I don’t want to play the diplomatic card, but in all honesty they’re all bangers. The reason we do it every year (as opposed to more frequently) is that you only have to come up with 12 bangers.
You want all killer, no filler.
You have no fillers. It’s the whole idea.
Who did the menu design?
Design was all Tess. Tess has come on board as our head of marketing for the Maybe group.
Boothby Staff