New restaurants with music on the menu

Shazam, the music recognition app, is quite handy when I’m out on a restaurant review. Sometimes I use it to discover the name of the music I’m loving, and sometimes to know what to avoid ever hearing again. Whatever is playing gives me a clue as to how the restaurant is branding itself and what sort of diners it wants to attract.

Restaurants already know how to define themselves by their interior design, food, prices and service levels. But the soundtrack is a little harder to nail. It sets the mood, changes the pace, keeps people engaged and creates the sort of environment their customers want to be in. But only if they get it right.

Your grandparents listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons when they dined out and your parents grooved to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. But now? Now, it’s jazz and house, techno and opera or – checks Shazam on phone – Vitamin String Quartet and A. Skillz & Krafty Kuts.

It’s a sonic buffet out there, offering an all-you-can-hear experience. Which means the places that distil their offering to something more sophisticated or select are special. Such as Ante, in Sydney’s Newtown, opened by sake importer and jazz obsessive Matt Young in 2022 as an homage to Japan’s “listening bars”, vinyl-spinning joints in which people gathered postwar for sake, whisky and tunes. Chef Jemma Whiteman plays along with Japanese-inflected dishes, such as coral trout tsukune with bottarga. It’s such a pure, personal expression of music, food and drinks, that everyone who walks in feels as if they are the first to discover it.

In Melbourne, the quirky Hope Street Radio in Collingwood acts as more of a tribal gathering place than a restaurant in which to eat pasta and listen to disco, soul and jazz. Then there’s Music Room, a hard-to-find (seemingly part of the DNA of these places) record-and-cocktail bar hidden behind sound-proofed doors off the stairwell inside a majestic Lonsdale Street building.

Back in Sydney, Matt Moran and the Solotel group have launched Rekodo Restaurant & Vinyl Bar at Barangaroo, with a snacky izakaya menu and state-of-the-art, $100,000 Klipsch La Scala sound system on the side.

It’s clever, buzzy and built for drinking – and it won’t be the last to integrate music with food. Now that the tunes have been pushed to the foreground, there’s no such thing as background music any more.

theemptyplate@goodweekend.com.au

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