What to expect when Silver’s Motel opens

A fresh episode of Drinks At Work will land on Thursday next week, and each following Thursday. In the meantime, we’ve got more new bar news in this newsletter — probably the most anticipated bar opening for some time, from some heavy hitters in the Sydney bar world. Let’s get into it.

I’ve written a lot about Enmore and Newtown of late. The Sydney district that stretches from King St Newtown and up Enmore Rd is home to the greatest concentration of quality bars outside the Sydney CBD, at least according to the bartenders who voted in the Boothby Best Bars NSW awards held the other week. And adding to that quality, we also shared the news last week that Deadwax, a small bar with a big focus on music and a quality hospitality team, is set to open this month.

So, yep — there’s a lot happening in that area right now.

But the most anticipated opening is yet to come. Late next week sees Silver’s Motel open at the top end of Enmore Rd, and it has been a long time coming; owners Tynan Sidhu and Michael Chiem have been working on the bar for three years.

“It’s been a long process,” Tynan says. That process involved a complete gutting and rebuilding of the venue’s interior, which for 30 years housed a real estate agent before Michael and Tynan came along.

“It’s a beautiful old building,” says Tynan, “and we were lucky enough to be given a completely blank space where we can come in and design everything from scratch. We were given a shell and we designed and built everything ourselves.

“We’ve just found really cool things that we like, and then fixed them up.”

Below, we dive into what to expect from Silver’s Motel, why it matters, and more.

Why does it matter?

Michael Chiem — better known in the industry as MC — is the owner of PS40, the multi-award winning bar in Sydney’s CBD which has developed a reputation for having the best drinks in town; his Africola has been awarded the title of Drink of the Year in both 2022 and 2024. This is MC’s second bar, and he’s partnered with co-owner Tynan Sidhu — who was most recently at PS40, but who you may have also seen bartending at St Peter and The Waratah.

What’s the big idea behind Silver's Motel?

Forget hotel bars, Silver’s Motel is what happens when you dial the formality down a notch. Where Maybe Sammy was billed as the hotel bar without the hotel, well, Silver’s Motel is a motel bar without the motel.

“Michael had this great idea where he was like, what about a motel bar?” Tynan says. “We unpacked it and we’re like, this speaks to everything about us, to our style of hospitality.”

Picture a mid-century motel — one you may have driven by or stayed in on roadtrips of yesteryear — and you’ll start to get a feel for the place.

“They’re a time capsule,” says Tynan. “They’re always so beautiful and unchanged, untouched and there’s a bit of mystery about them.”

And it corresponds with the duo’s desire of “not wanting to be too fancy,” according to MC. “The offering was meant to be bit more pared back, a little bit more of this Enmore area.

“I love PS40, love having a bar in the city, I love the city so much. But I think one thing that Covid taught us was that we explored our neighbourhoods a little bit more. I started exploring this neighbourhood a lot more. And my sister lives around the corner. Tynan grew up in this area.

“This is my personal analogy, that won’t work for everyone, but [Silver’s Motel is] a place where you’d leave home to go do your grocery shopping, have a quick half beer before you get there, and then maybe on the way back have another half beer. You could visit multiple times in a day, not multiple times in a week, and it feels comfortable. Whereas I feel like PS40 and a lot of bars are an occasion place for a lot of people.

“You could stay in a motel more often than you can stay in a hotel. And then we just kept kind of building from there.”

And hey, an early tip: it has to be a shoe-in for Motel Bar of the Year.

What can you expect from the cocktails?

MC is quick to point out that whilst they’re putting all the care and consideration into the cocktails they normally would at PS40, at Silver’s Motel the approach is fundamentally different — more about feel — and an approach he is calling country cocktails.

“The drinks are just as considered, just as complicated in flavour, but maybe paired back a little in terms of concept and approach,” he says.

“I read a lot of cookbooks. Probably the only reading I do these days. And a lot of my favourite chefs, like Francis Mallmann, are cooking with fire in very isolated areas. And it’s all about time and a place, simple ingredients, simple approach, a bit rustic in comparison. Definitely not less flavoursome. So I was looking into country cooking, cooking with fire, and then we’ve somewhat translated that to cocktails — country cocktails is where we’ve landed.”

So what does that look like?

“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel with cocktails, so there’s a lot of nice little twists on classic cocktails,” MC says. To illustrate, he describes one of his favourite drinks on the menu — a Gold Rush riff — that employs marigold flowers. “Rye, lemon, splash of Montenegro, a bit of honey,” he says. “The only real difference is we’ve gotten some really awesome marigold flowers from Darling Mills, which is a farm that grows a lot of fancy little fruits and herbs. And then using caster sugar as an abrasive in a mortar and pestle, we make a paste with the flowers. Like if you go to an Italian restaurant and they make a pesto, it’s basil and salt as their abrasive, and garlic. That’s how they make the paste. We’re making a paste out of flowers and chucking it in a Gold Rush; the flowers have a really nice passion fruit element.”

When I say to him that it sounds like something you might come up with sitting around a campfire, he stresses that the approach they’re taking isn’t too far off that.

“It’s somewhat intuitive as well,” MC says. “There’s not really like a 10ml, 15 mil — you gotta look at it, you gotta understand how it’s all working. One of the drinks, the Spritz that we have on our menu, uses burnt mandarin. We were out the back cooking the mandarins because we don’t want to set off the fire alarms in here. And everyone’s like, how long does it take? And I’m like, I don’t know.”

“It’s hard to sometimes describe in words exactly what we’re trying to do. We know comfort food, but what about comfort drinks?”

“I think the best drinks make people feel a certain way,” says Tynan. “So hopefully when people come to the bar, they taste things and it reminds them of something familiar, and it makes them feel really good.

“I reckon they taste pretty good.”

What’s on the back bar?

If you're here, and you're drinking the back bar, you're drinking whisky. Tynan has been collecting whisky for over a decade with a view to opening his own bar; you’ll find a lot of it on the bar at Silver's Motel.

What’s the place going to look like?

I’m not telling.

Usually I’d try and describe the room for you, but I don’t know if I should in this case; I was genuinely wowed walking into the room, and I want you to have that feeling. I didn’t know what to expect going in, and sometimes, that first moment stepping inside a new place can frame everything that goes after it.

I don’t want to spoil it for you.

When does Silver’s Motel open, what days of the week are they serving?

Expect Silver’s to open their doors to the public for the first time late next week; they’ll be trading 4pm to 2am six nights a week, closing only on Tuesdays.

You can find Silver’s Motel at 187 Enmore Rd, Enmore.