Sydney is many things — busy and chaotic, maddening, often beautiful — but one thing it isn’t is affordable. However you slice it, Sydney is an expensive city to live in — the secondmost expensive (or even most expensive) in the world, supposedly.
In other words, the rent is too damn high.
Today the shiny new Sydney Fish Market opens, complete with a fancy architecturally designed roof, expanded retail space, and a bunch of eating and drinking spots. Over $800 million of NSW taxpayer revenue has been spent on the project. There’s a live blog of the opening of it on The Sydney Morning Herald’s website, which is so Sydney. The space is so big that one of the early visitors today described it as like an airport — my money is that it’ll come with airport food pricing too, despite the NSW premier’s suggestion that there’ll be something for everyone. I hope the place is a destination that is accessible to all walks of life, however much you earn.
I’m doubtful that’s how it will shake out. More likely, the new market will be busy to begin with, before settling into a Darling Harbour-like period of mediocrity and vapid tourist trap restaurants for the next decade. And then we’ll all be excited when they inevitably knock down this boondoggle to replace it with yet another.
That’s because, as today’s interview subject Sebastian Soto has often said, in Sydney you’re busiest days are your first days and your last days. It’s the in-between part which is the hardest.
Soto — or as Cosmo as he’s better known — knows a little about opening and closing bars. He is a co-owner of Double Deuce Lounge along with Charlie Lehmann and Dardan Shervashidze, the same trio who are behind Ramblin’ Rascal Tavern, which turns 12 years old this year. When they opened Double Deuce in mid-2019, it was the grown-up cocktail bar to Rascal’s five star dive bar sibling, and it has won a number of awards in that time: they were 2024’s number one bar and Best Cocktail Bar at the Boothby Best Bars NSW awards in 2024, and last year were named Good Food’s Bar of the Year.
But a combination of lower trade post-Covid in the north end of the CBD, and the increasingly tougher economics of the bar business meant that they’ve opted not to renew their lease on Bridge Street, and closed after the first weekend of trade this year with a big takeover from Melbourne bar Caretaker’s Cottage.
But, as Cosmo explains in the interview below (lightly edited and condensed for clarity), it’s not the end for Double Deuce Lounge — they’ll be back with a new iteration of the bar in a smaller space in the next few months.
Below, we talk about:
- why smaller, independent bars matter in the city
- why owners who work in these bars make a difference
- the tension between indie bars and big box corporate hospitality
- what bar owners can control, and the costs they cannot
Let’s get into it.
BOOTHBY: What does it feel like to be closing? Because you’ve been here how many years?
COSMO: Almost seven. It’s bittersweet, guess. I’m excited because we’re not fully closing and fully dying. We are moving. But it’s sad. I don’t really want to have to go, but these things happen.
BOOTHBY: And the place feels lived in now. Bars, they’re not made overnight.
COSOMO: I always say, you know, your busiest days are your first and your last day and it’s fucking true.