The Underground Experiment

Venture beyond the bookshelf and down the secret stairs of Smith Street’s Noble Experiment and you will find buried treasure – an underground haven filled with fantastical, boozy delights.

Mixing master Linus Schaxmann welcomed Milk Bar Mag into his lair, where the cocktails on offer hail from the ‘80s and ‘90s, look preposterously extravagant and taste bloody fantastic.

Schaxmann boisterously banters while shaking, stirring and pouring to perfection, sharing his mission to inject some fun into the notoriously “serious” cocktail scene “with gay abandon”. He’s jujjed up the (historically naff) classics with cleverly mixed liquor and quirky details.

Sex on the Beach is served with edible sand and Chambord Caviar, and if you like Pina Coladas (couldn’t help it), a mini cup cake is served alongside your coconut cream and candied pineapple concoction.

A tropical ‘fish’ swims in the Blue Lagoon, and the Zombie (Schazmann’s personal favourite) combines seven different rums in what can only be described as an epic vessel – a wondrously kitsch goblet of deliciousness.

The menu will rotate every few months (with a seemingly impossible light-up cocktail currently in the works), and the experiment’s whole theme will transform periodically.

A soundtrack sporting the likes of Vanilla Ice and Cyndi Lauper sets the current tone, with the leather-boothed basement (an alleged sex dungeon back in the day) serving as the perfect den for screenings of the era’s best flicks – tonight’s bill including the Blues Brothers and The Breakfast Club.

It’s a hell of step up from your average swizzle stick and paper parasol.

The Underground Experiment
Basement of The Nobel Experiment
284 Smith Street, Collingwood
Friday and Saturday evenings till 3am
www.thenobleexperiment.com.au