The clue is in the name – the walls are lined with vinyl records in this tiny listening bar with Tokyo laneway vibes, serving Japanese-inflected cocktails and snacks.
Sydney’s Ivy Precinct on George Street in the centre of the city is now so sprawling it practically needs its own postcode. If you wanted to, you could plan an entire night around its various venues. But the one thing it lacked was a cool, buzzy cocktail bar; the kind of place you could drop into for quick after-work drinks before switching to snacks at Mumu, dinner at Felix, a little late-night wildness at the Pool Club and midnight munchies at Jimmy’s Falafel.
Enter the bubblegum-bright JAM Record Bar. The “JAM” part is an acronym of the matriarch and patriarch of the precinct’s founding Hemmes family (John and Merivale), and this tiny 40-seater specialising in Japanese-tilted cocktails and tiny snacks has been designed as the place to start your engines before you move on to the main event.
The concept is loosely based on Japan’s “listening bars” but unlike the OG Japanese versions, you’re not expected to sit still and pay dutiful attention while each record is dropped. Still, the music is definitely a critical part of the experience at JAM. In fact, the entire place is designed to make you feel like you’re sitting inside a speaker enclosure, with everything from floor to ceiling designed to feel like a big, sound-insulated plywood box.
The menu for the drinks is snappy – developed, almost certainly, to give you a little taste tester for the bigger night you’ll have when you move through your Ivy venue journey.
