Inside Hayden Lambert’s acclaimed Melbourne cocktail bar Above Board, there are no spirits bottles on display. It’s a purposeful rejection that’s both earned him devoted fans and cost him the odd friendship with brand reps. “I’ve started describing myself as Vegemite and crunchy peanut butter,” Hayden tells us contentedly through trademark white glasses that, like everything in his world, have a story behind them.
Inside Hayden Lambert’s acclaimed Melbourne cocktail bar Above Board, there are no spirits bottles on display. It’s a purposeful rejection that’s both earned him devoted fans and cost him the odd friendship with brand reps. “I’ve started describing myself as Vegemite and crunchy peanut butter,” Hayden tells us contentedly through trademark white glasses that, like everything in his world, have a story behind them. His minimalist approach isn’t just aesthetic – it’s philosophical, extending from his analog cocktail techniques to the meticulously stripped-back space that “looks like a Tetris puzzle about to be completed.”
Hayden Lambert, Above Board, And The Metaverse
Every day, Lambert spends two hours on Melbourne’s highways to reach the bar he opened in 2016. It’s a 67km Mad Max journey, he says, where “the speed limit’s a hundred and everyone sits on 105 or 110.”
During these drives, his mind wanders through dimensions. “I really sucked at school,” Hayden announces – and he mentions his dyslexia often during our conversation – “but I’m into physics,” he confesses, his white glasses catching the light on our video call. “When I listen to scientific podcasts, I’m like, ‘Wow, you think there’s multi-dimensions?'” Somewhere in one of those dimensions, there might be a bar called Below Board, run by a Hayden Lambert with black glasses, using a cocktail book that our Hayden can no longer find.
The Missing Artifact
“I gave one copy away to someone else with all my notes in it,” he says of his heavily annotated copy of Hugo R. Ensslin’s ‘Recipes for Mixed Drinks,’ a bartending bible, published in 1916, he once studied religiously. “Back before we opened, I would have had my head buried in it. I’d have notes like Professor Snape. I totally write in the book and highlight sections.”
This missing artifact – filled with marginalia in pink and yellow highlighter and “unintelligible” scribblings – feels like a perfect metaphor for Lambert’s approach to bartending: analog, deeply personal, and impossible to replicate. “I would have highlighted them in two colors – pink and yellow. I don’t know what the colors meant,” he admits with a laugh. “I would have scribbled unintelligibly in the margins, and revisited them and wondered what the hell I was talking about.”
Above Board Tastes Like Hopes And Dreams…And Lots Of Hard Work
When Above Board opened in 2016, it immediately distinguished itself through what it lacked rather than what it contained. No unnecessary garnishes. No compromises. “It’s a rebellion against the style of a bar that builds borders and walls on the bar top and has all this junk that’s unnecessary,” Lambert continues. “I didn’t know when we did the bar that it was going to be expressed in a really minimal way. I just had a lot of design ideas that I really wanted to implement.”
The result was a space that tastes “like hopes, and dreams…and hard work.”
Less Is More At Above Board
This minimalism wasn’t initially calculated. “I still didn’t have the vernacular to talk about design,” says Lambert, despite the fact his father was an architectural designer. “It was just ‘less is more.’ That’s how I looked at it. I stripped all the sh*t I really didn’t like being in a bar, back.”
If his 2016 self could time-travel to the present, Lambert jokes he’d tell himself to “put Grey Goose on the back bar. Make the reps happy.” But that would betray his foundational philosophy: “If you don’t have a vision, someone else will f*cking ruin it for you. They’ll come in and tell you the exact opposite of what works.”
Perhaps Lambert’s most recognizable feature – his white glasses – came about just as organically as his bar design. “I wouldn’t say I chose the glasses. The glasses chose me,” he insists. While shopping at Dresden, an Australian eyewear shop, he tried on clear frames (disappointing) and black frames (which made him “look like a shitty Heston Blumenthal”). “As a joke, I tried on the white ones, and the retail person’s pupils dilated within two seconds, and I went, ‘Ah, those will do. Thank you.'” Now with eight pairs, he’s instantly recognizable worldwide.
Above Board Bouncing Around The World’s 50 Best Bars
Despite Above Board’s acclaim – “We were at #44 on the World’s 50 Best Bars and I’ve had more compliments being in the 100 – right on the 100 – 98, 86, and 44, and now we’re back at 100” – Lambert maintains a humility rare in the industry. “I’m a little bit older than people expect me to be,” he admits about coming from a rare vintage of bartenders before lots of the modern tools and tech arrived.
So, Hayden sees himself more of a craftsman rather than a technologist. “I’m in that weird category of bartenders that came from a particular period of time without access to technology. It’s not that technology scares me. I just find that lots of drinks that come from technology, if they’re not accessed correctly, don’t have any value.”
Like Hugo R. Ensslin’s ‘Recipes For Mixed Drinks’ we wonder what kind of book Hayden would produce about cocktails. “If I made my own book about cocktails it would be about creating those styles of drinks and flavors without access to technology – my style is minimalist and analog.” His main criticism of modern techniques? “Reinventing the wheel every time you make a drink.”
Lambert’s perspective extends to Melbourne’s unique bar culture. “Melbourne has realized there’s a real estate market and a consumer market for smaller, intimate spaces. If Melburnians could get access to a cupboard they’d open a bar in it. I would too. I’d call mine Only Negroni. I’d have a tiny guy in a white jacket handing out Negronis,” he laughs.
But his bar’s name ‘Above Board’ has the connotation of ‘legit’ – at least in UK slang – which hints at Lambert’s straightforward approach. When asked how legit he is, he answers with characteristic directness mixed with a little caginess: “I’d say we’re 98% legit. The 2% doesn’t matter to talk about. It’s a business, right?” he says breaking out into laugher again.
White Glasses, A Minimalist Masterpiece, And A Daily Commute
As our conversation winds down, we can’t help but wonder again about that annotated book somewhere out there – filled with the embryonic ideas of one of Australia’s most distinctive bartenders. Perhaps in another dimension, a Hayden Lambert with black glasses is using it to create an entirely different kind of bar.
The real Lambert, though, seems content with his current reality: white glasses, a minimalist masterpiece, and a daily commute filled with podcasts about multiple dimensions – a perfect distillation of the man himself.
