Small Bar & Kitchen

We frequently pop down to Small bar on the weekend for breakfast. This is a bar though so your usual breakfast offerings are there — coffee, tea, bacon & eggs, fresh juices etc. however, no milkshakes, smoothies, pancakes etc.
The service is exceptional and the food is really tasty. It is reasonably priced and a lovely spot for breakfast.

What a lovely café! Stumbled across this wee gem when walking around Kirribilli after the markets. Great coffee, home-​made desserts (I tried the steamed ginger pudding — delicious!) and really friendly staff.
For something a little different on a winters day, give the mulled wine a go. A really popular choice and great local hang out :)

I love this bar, always warm & welcoming the food is tapas & they have a good selection to suit every taste. They have a number of specialist bottled beers & mulled wine in winter. The décor is just right & creates a feeling of being relaxed & intimate, where you can sit alone savouring a craft ale or can meet with friends & share tapas! Perfectly cute bar

Collect the whole set of Small Bars! I just did, this was the last one I needed after the CBD and Crows Nest. And, y’know, all the Pokemons. I also have footy cards and pogs if you’re interested.
It’s kind of café-​like, and slots nicely into Kirribilli’s village feel. There’s some cruisy table and chair combos for casual pavement lurking — I always take the fresh air chairs, they’re the money seats — or you can prop up the bar downstairs. Expect a raft of craft beers, and if you’re lucky they might have some white sangria infused with strawberries on the counter to avail yourself of.
Grand for an arvo tipple or a business meeting that ain’t too business-​y.

Far too expensive, even for Kirribilli. At these prices, The Botanist offers a better range of meals and wine.

This place has a great vibe. Perfect place to come to have drinks with your girlfriends post dinner — still peckish? No problem, have some nibbles and keep the drinks coming. Great service and friendly barkeep!

Good venue with tasty tapas, decent selection of wines and beers, and very friendly/​attentive service. High recommend the sweet potato gnocchi. Would definitely go back.

Anywhere that serves mulled wine in winter gets a thumbs up from me. Small bar, like its two sister bars, has a comprehensive wine list with plenty to choose from by the glass, including a delicious Malbec. There were a few interesting cocktails on the big blackboard over the kitchen including a salted caramel espresso martini. I saw the bartender make a good dozen or two in the time I was there but I wasn’t game enough to risk what could potentially be an alcoholic Starbucks frappé, particularly after my friend’s complaints of the underextracted coffee she’d had here one morning.
The food however is a bit ordinary. Great school prawns but it’s pretty hard to stuff up something you just deep fry. The chickpeas were a bit mushy in their chickpea and pumpkin braise (don’t you just love the super descriptive names restaurants use these days), making it all a bit textureless. Great sweet potato gnocchi but why so stingy with only 6 in a serve?
Hats off to them for have hooks for coats at the door, and I was super excited about the bike pedals attached to the bar stools (finally, calorie neutral drinking!!) but was disappointed to find that the pedals were fixed in place.
Great for a drink if you’re in the neighbourhood but I wouldn’t get onya bike for it.

In the calmest Sunday afternoon hours we stopped by a new gaff wedged between Pizzeria Rio and the bottle-​o for a beer and a late lunch, just before a jaunt to the cinema. Colourful, oozing style, with a wonderful soundtrack and a distinctly European flair, I utterly adored it. From the impressive meal it opened with to the delicate dessert creations that formed a centrepiece, I found it a wholly rewarding experience, and remarkable value. I have decided to rate The Grand Budapest Hotel five stars.
Oh, the small bar? Right… Right. Unlike Wes Anderson’s new opus, it was sadly generic. Since the franchise of Small Bars™ first opened up in Erskineville and Crows Nest to ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s, Sydney’s been overrun by similarly cramped spaces repurposed to sell booze to workaday alcoholics. I have to admit that this one does use its space well; I walked by in its first week and was amazed, peering in, by what looked to be some genuine nightlife going on in the shoebox compartment. On Sunday it was airy and spacious and inviting. But there’s not much identity to it beyond that — it’s just an inoffensive place to get a beer. Do we need that so desperately, anymore? I’m not so sure.
The greater issue is that this bar also takes pains to laud its own kitchen — it’s right there in the title! But the food — again, unlike the film, which I highly recommend — is not good value Each tapas-​style plate was meagre and uninspired in creation; dry cubes of chicken breast, «jerked», were small enough to make a half-​dozen McNuggets look like a hunger buster; the whitebait is about a third of the size of the one they sell upstairs at Street Market; and I have to say that it’s the smallest plate of chips I’ve ever seen. They weren’t even great — soft, rather than crisp, and unseasoned. A fine chip needs no aioli. These do. Half a dozen pricey shared plates later and I remained largely unsated.
If you’re looking for your seventh Marlborough Sav-​Blanc of the week and a snack to tide you over between brunch and secondsies, check out Small Bar and Kitchen. If you want to experience something interesting and fill your belly, go see the Grand Budapest Hotel and order a large popcorn.